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

[BlackCartouche]

The above is not totally true, as chaos is not the same as evil. Chaos is entropy and to choose lies, false gods, chaos or entropy is to sin or 'to err' or to do evil.

I see chaos as the result of interaction between STS and STO at its convergence/separation 'battle zone'. In a funny kind of way, I see the STS principle of constriction/contraction funneled down into the abyss into non-existence, as having its own kind of 'order'.
I also see chaos as raw unstructured information needing to be structured into creative order expressed through consciousness processing it all, that comes about as Learning Lessons. Each bit of chaos resultant from the STS/STO battle that becomes structured and aligned with creative order, is a little piece of lesson learned.

religion, it a more pure form, has a big role to play in our lives, to re-ligare, or bind us together,

is of the Latin "religare" meaning "to bind", of which "religion" comes about

By the way... That was pure coincidence on my part there. I didn't see Laura's post until after I posted mine. I didn't mean to plagiarize (if anyone was wondering)

 

[Cosmos]

I've been thinking about another argument against neo-Darwinism. I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if thought of it myself, and I'm not sure it's entirely correct, but hopefully those of you who know better will tell me.

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?

Good one! Yes it doesn't make sense at all. If you go by that theory everything should be cockroaches indeed and yet we have a myriad of very complex and vulnerable species including humans who by the "logic" of it, shouldn't exist in the first place.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

I've been thinking about another argument against neo-Darwinism. I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if thought of it myself, and I'm not sure it's entirely correct, but hopefully those of you who know better will tell me.

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 a good argument, IMO. And it's one of the problems that vexed Whitehead and prompted him to come up with the central ideas of process philosophy. The question doesn't just apply to evolution, either. How does novelty - ANY novelty - get introduced into a mechanical creation? It is impossible, unless creation is not mechanical. Neo-Darwinists think that chance recombinations of matter will introduce new things, but that's absurd. It's worse than magical thinking. But it applies to their thought as well: how can they think new thoughts? How can they introduce new ideas? There's a mystery there that they don't consider. And they can't consider it, because they think that they lack free will - even as they revise their papers use their own freedom (however limited) to construct arguments they think are persuasive. If evolution truly produced their minds, and thus their thoughts, and thus their theories, then there is no reason to be persuaded that they are TRUE, because you need a degree of freedom in order think rationally. Otherwise you are just a machine and cannot freely discover what is true.

 

[genero81]

By the way... That was pure coincidence on my part there. I didn't see Laura's post until after I posted mine. I didn't mean to plagiarize (if anyone was wondering)

Interesting, I was also thinking about the magnetic center that G speaks of before I saw Aeneas post. I think what's taking place in this thread is the connecting of chakras the C's speak of. Almost as though we're beginning to think as one mind.

 

[luc]

I actually think it was useful to go through all the other processes we have done, before coming to this material, especially religious studies. Without knowing what is wrong with religion, it would be all too easy to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. Indeed, religion, it a more pure form, has a big role to play in our lives, to re-ligare, or bind us together, but as with everything else, we should examine things and base our choices on what seems most likely to be TRUE. And it seems to me that True Science can help with that, also; NOT "materialist" science

Good point about the danger of going to the other extreme, and yes, it seems that as always, in hindsight it all makes a lot more sense how things unfolded. The universe really seems to have a knack for throwing us into a pit and then make us crawl out of it!

I remember how years ago, while still at university and long before I found Cass, I was obsessed about morality and whether there is any objective moral code. But the twisting materialism so ingrained in me just had me stumble in the dark. The early Wittgenstein argued that it doesn't even make sense to speak of anything higher, which kind of sealed the deal. Then I stumbled upon all those guys explaining morality with evolutionary arguments and promoted the idea that we should make morality a "science", which I thought was cool. But all of that was somehow not satisfying. It's just running in circles. But nothing could get through this Darwinian-materialistic fog, and so I abandoned all of that altogether and gave myself over completely to a life full of nihilism, chaos and misery. This mind-bug also prevented me from seeing some things, people and thought processes creeping into my life that were utterly destructive on a soul level.

I certainly don't want to blame Darwinism for my own idiocy, but there IS a connection, and this might explain why it feels so good to finally root out that toxic virus from my heart once and for all. It sure seems as if something used Darwinist ideas to tie up our brains in a knot, sealing it tight and imprison us in a materialist universe. But in a sense, as you said, perhaps we should be grateful for having to go through all this. I mean, in the past, people took God and higher realities for granted. But we were given the opportunity to crawl out of the materialist pit and definitely gained a much deeper understanding in the process. And it also prevents us from falling for the next best religious belief system and/or discarding science altogether, or abandoning rationality, or the myriad of other traps. But really, it's one thing to have "faith in the process", have an inkling that this can't be all, have the C's tell us strange stories of extraterrestrial geneticists and so on, but it's quite another thing to finally, finally kill that bug, untie the brain and have your heart warmed by a pure, beautiful sense of wonder and undiluted light. Ah yes, isn't it amazing.

 

[genero81]

I remember how years ago, while still at university and long before I found Cass, I was obsessed about morality and whether there is any objective moral code. But the twisting materialism so ingrained in me just had me stumble in the dark. The early Wittgenstein argued that it doesn't even make sense to speak of anything higher, which kind of sealed the deal. Then I stumbled upon all those guys explaining morality with evolutionary arguments and promoted the idea that we should make morality a "science", which I thought was cool. But all of that was somehow not satisfying. It's just running in circles. But nothing could get through this Darwinian-materialistic fog, and so I abandoned all of that altogether and gave myself over completely to a life full of nihilism, chaos and misery. This mind-bug also prevented me from seeing some things, people and thought processes creeping into my life that were utterly destructive on a soul level.

Whitehead does some really interesting thinking on this subject. You may want to check out 'Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy'

 

[genero81]

Actually I'm still making my way through this book. Just came across his chocolate cake analogy.

 

[Laura]

I've been thinking about another argument against neo-Darwinism. I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if thought of it myself, and I'm not sure it's entirely correct, but hopefully those of you who know better will tell me.

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?

Another way to think about that is: if Darwinism is what runs the show, why did all life on earth evolve to be human???

 

[Laura]

One of the things Darwinists, and by association atheists, seek to explain away 'feelings' of compassion empathy and remorse, is its the evolutionary process for collective sociability to ensure a developed consciously-aware species its own self preservation of survival, so as to bind together in common cause and to further evolve via complex social dynamics, necessary to evolve both civilization further, and also a counteractive measure against our progressive ability to blow ourselves up with the rest of the planet.
Its ironic, then, that the very "binding" Darwinists argue is a favorable evolutionary intra-species characteristic necessity to ensure species-survival, is of the Latin "religare" meaning "to bind", of which "religion" comes about - is the very thing Darwinism seeks to undermine.

It then struck me that, if 'pooling together' (for lack of a better term) collectively through the evolved feelings of compassion empathy and remorse for one another as a necessary requirement to maintain sociability of evolved consciousness, is in one sense the nearest to a Darwinist concept for "soul-pooling", but in another way - and maybe because of it - its become, conceptually, a restriction of an otherwise natural step onward toward the evolutionary process leading to "individuation". This is interesting because Darwinist/atheist don't believe in souls, so what then, would be "individuation" of raw consciousness without a soul? The evolutionary next step of non-souled individuation would surely be to break free from the collective consciousness of its sociably binding constraints, and in doing so is to discard those very things that "bind": Compassion, empathy and remorse.

It stands to reason that the psychopath is the Darwinist/atheist definition of evolved consciousness into 'anti'-souled individuation.

Good progression in stating the case, IMO. And that sure does look like what we are seeing.

 

[Cosmos]

Just started with the book and right from the start it helped me understand something that bugged me since I couldn't understand why it is. Something I couldn't make heads nor tails out of, which none of the other works I have started to read about genetics and molecular life have explained yet understandably and this let me to doubt how much of it is actually based on observed data and how much is just calculated ideas and assumptions including about genes themselves. Some of those lacking pieces that this author now brought up have resulted in my confusion expressed here. I now realize I couldn't understand just why there didn't seem to be any actual photos or imagery from those parts of the cells all those authors talked about. Since I'm an engineered minded person that was something that bugged me and I thought that most of this might therfore just be hypothetical ideas without much real ground on observed things.

Here is the part from the book:

Meanwhile, the cellular black box was steadily explored. The investigation of the cell pushed the microscope to its limits, which are set by the wavelength of light. For physical reasons a microscope cannot resolve two points that are closer together than approximately one-half of the wavelength of the light that is illuminating them. Since the wavelength of visible light is roughly one-tenth the diameter of a bacterial cell, many small, critical details of cell structure simply cannot be seen with a light microscope. The black box of the cell could not be opened without further technological improvements.

In the late nineteenth century, as physics progressed rapidly, J. J. Thomson discovered the electron; the invention of the electron microscope followed several decades later. Because the wavelength of the electron is shorter than the wavelength of visible light, much smaller objects can be resolved if they are “illuminated” with electrons. Electron microscopy has a number of practical difficulties, not least of which is the tendency of the electron beam to fry the sample. But ways were found to get around the problems, and after World War II electron microscopy came into its own.

New subcellular structures were discovered: Holes were seen in the nucleus, and double membranes detected around mitochondria (a cell’s power plants). The same cell that looked so simple under a light microscope now looked much different. The same wonder that the early light microscopists felt when they saw the detailed structure of insects was again felt by twentieth-century scientists when they saw the complexities of the cell.

So now I think I understand: Because of physical reasons no one is able to look through even the best normal microscope and see anything like a nucleus or double membranes etc in them. It is simply impossible. To see/detect smaller details like them you need another technology (electron microscopy) that not uses visible light, to even be able to detect those structures and then convert it to an image that is visible to the human eye! To go even smaller than that you need still a better method that needs even more elaborated converting to make it digestible/seeable to the human eye.

What do proteins look like? Although Emil Fischer showed that they were made of amino acids, the details of their structures were unknown. Their size put them below the reach of even electron microscopy, yet it was becoming clear that proteins were the fundamental machines of life, catalyzing the chemistry and building the structures of the cell. A new technique therefore was needed to study protein structure.

During the first part of the twentieth century, X-ray crystallography was used to determine the structures of small molecules. Crystallography involves shining a beam of X-rays onto a crystal of a chemical; the rays scatter by a process called diffraction. If photographic film is placed behind the crystal, then the diffracted X-rays can be detected by examining the exposed film. The pattern of diffraction can, after the application of strenuous mathematics, indicate the position of each and every atomin the molecule. Turning the guns of X-ray crystallography onto proteins would show their structure, but there was a big problem: the more atoms in a molecule, the harder the mathematics, and the harder the task of crystallizing the chemical in the first place. Because proteins have dozens of times more atoms than the molecules typically examined by crystallography, that makes the problem dozens of times more difficult. But some people have dozens of times more perseverance than the rest of us.

In 1958, after decades of work, J. C. Kendrew determined the structure of the protein myoglobin using X-ray crystallography; finally, a technique showed the detailed structure of one of the basic components of life. And what was seen? Once again, more complexity.
[...]
As the result of the X-ray work of Kendrew on proteins and (most famously) Watson and Crick on DNA, for the first time biochemists actually knew the shapes of the molecules that they were working on. The beginning of modern biochemistry, which has progressed at a breakneck pace since, can be dated to that time. Advances in physics and chemistry, too, have spilled over and created a strong synergism for research on life.

Although in theory X-ray crystallography can determine the structure of all the molecules of living things, practical problems limit its use to a relatively small number of proteins and nucleic acids.

So now I maybe understand why I was so confused about all the description on what a gene, chromosome etc. is and how it looks and behaves, since it took those scientist a lot of inventions and new cutting edge methods to convert the data of what those new instruments detected into something the human eye can see.

And then he goes on to explain even better methods that came afterwards that probably enabled them "to see" genes and stuff. Have to read on though.

 

[Joe]

I've been thinking about another argument against neo-Darwinism. I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if thought of it myself, and I'm not sure it's entirely correct, but hopefully those of you who know better will tell me.

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?

I think they'd explain it by saying that many forms of life develop through 'random mutation' and there is scope for many life forms to exist via 'survival of the fittest', but some are more 'fit' than others and they get to be 'top of the heap'. Still 'random mutation' is bogus, so it's all horse hockey.

 

[Joe]

It seems pretty clear to me now that Darwinism, in particular Neo Darwinism and the pseudo science that supports it, was a big part of the 4D STS programming project. So the 'trial run' was a Darwinian inspired attempt to forcibly promote the so called "superior race" by the brute force of war and eugenics. This time appears to be driven by a Darwinian inspired mind set that inevitably manifest itself through 'logical conclusions' based on said mind set in the form of simplistic and ill advised ideologies leading to God knows what outcome. Probably loss of life on a grand scale and general hysteria and irrationality.

Something I find pretty interesting is the fact that, if Nazi Germany was a 'trail run' for events today, then it doesn't seem that it was merely a first test and that what is happening today is totally detached from the 'trial run'. Consider that the promotion of the amoral 'values' are spreading throughout Western society today is achieved in part through silencing any opposition to that spread by denouncing opponents as 'Nazis'! So the Nazi 'trail run' sounds more like it was the frame for today's events, to some extent.

 

[goyacobol]

Something I find pretty interesting is the fact that, if Nazi Germany was a 'trail run' for events today, then it doesn't seem that it was merely a first test and that what is happening today is totally detached from the 'trial run'. Consider that the promotion of the amoral 'values' are spreading throughout Western society today is achieved in part through silencing any opposition to that spread by denouncing opponents as 'Nazis'! So the Nazi 'trail run' sounds more like it was the frame for today's events, to some extent.

I agree it is really like the "programming is complete".

Session 14 July 1996:

Q: (L) Let's boil it down. Was Hitler's agenda a practice run for a future scenario?

A: Close. Was a "testing" of the will.

Q: (L) Whose will was being tested?

A: Yours.

Q: (L) Me specifically, or the planet?

A: Latter.

 

[fabric]

I think they'd explain it by saying that many forms of life develop through 'random mutation' and there is scope for many life forms to exist via 'survival of the fittest', but some are more 'fit' than others and they get to be 'top of the heap'. Still 'random mutation' is bogus, so it's all horse hockey.

Behe describes in Edge of Evolution how the ‘top of the heap’ doesn’t work at all and random mutation actually makes its own case for why it isn’t possible to develop anything more advanced by following that pattern. Here is the relevant excerpt – it’s quite an interesting read.

A problem akin to the knight’s predicament has been discussed fitfully with no resolution in evolutionary biology journals under the name “rugged fitness landscapes.” 8 In the 1930s the mathematical biologist Ronald Fisher pictured evolution as an exercise in hill climbing. The idea is that a species would gradually evolve to get better and better— to become more “fit”— until it was as good as it could be under the circumstances. In a sense, the species would rise to the acme of an evolutionary hill. Once there, it would be stuck— going back down the hill means getting less fit, which in a Darwinian competition should almost always be prohibited. 9 Well, what if, more realistically, instead of a single hill, the evolutionary geography actually resembled a badlands: a whole rugged landscape filled with many hills— big ones, little ones, tiny ones? The tiny ones are by far the most common, bigger ones much less frequent. There is only one highest peak. If so, then in a rugged evolutionary landscape, it is much more likely that a species will climb a tiny hill and get stuck there, unable to become less fit, yet forever isolated from the surrounding peaks. Random mutation and natural selection can’t solve the rugged landscape dilemma— they actually cause the dilemma.

Even in the shadow of an evolutionary Mount Everest— the promise of some terrific new biological feature— the challenge of a rugged landscape would remain. In fact, that is where it would become especially difficult. The more complex and interactive a system, the more its simple variations will short-circuit evolutionary hill climbing. As a physical example, think of the goal of building a structure like Iacocca Hall. An evolutionary story might start with a small shack, useful as a shelter, and hope to build on that. But the materials one would use to build a shack (wood, straw, nails) are not the ones one would need for a larger structure (cement, steel). The shack would serve, for a while, but could not be altered into a large building without essentially being replaced. Yet tearing down the building would remove the only shelter available at the time. Even construction of a small building that improbably used cement and steel would not include spaces for future staircases, electrical wiring, and so on that would be needed for a larger building. A smaller building that did have space for them would very likely be less efficient and more costly than one that didn’t. {and we know that nature is very efficient when it comes to processes - and if it did incorporate 'space' for future upgrades, that would involved design!}

To mix metaphors, how many steps should we expect random mutation and natural selection to climb before getting stuck on a tiny hill of a rugged landscape? Very few. Using a sophisticated mathematical model, H. Allen Orr decided that the likeliest number for a single gene was between just one and two. 10 That count fits pretty well both with John Maynard Smith’s reasoning about proteins and with what we know from the best relevant data on evolution we have available— the effects of malaria on the human genome. The evolutionary response of the human genome to Plasmodium falciparum has been exactly what you’d expect of a Darwinian process— disjointed and incoherent. In one group of humans the G6PD gene is broken, in another band 3 protein is defective. Both are single steps to small, local adaptive peaks. The sickle mutation pops up once or a few times, and then, separately, alterations in fetal hemoglobin ameliorate its side effects— several steps to an unrelated adaptive peak. Like some blind knight stumbling through a castle maze, in the case of sickle/ fetal hemoglobin, Darwinism has managed to walk up two steps, but has become stuck in an evolutionary dead end. Random mutation and natural selection are operating at full steam, but they lead nowhere.

This is not the kind of process that could have coordinated the many proteins that work in concert in intraflagellar transport. It is not the kind of process that leads to any significant degree of coherence.

 

[luc]

I just want to recommend again to read “Darwinian Fairytales” by David Stove. I’m still in the middle of it, but one thing is clear: if DBB cured you from believing in Darwinist biological evolution, this book will cure you from Darwinist thinking about culture and humanity. I think this is especially important today where you might be tempted to go Darwin in response to the crazy leftists (yet another trap!). Darwinist thinking is also incredibly insidious when it comes to our own lives, goals and aspirations and our view of the “human condition”.

Stove himself isn’t a bleeding-heart liberal crying about brutal Darwinism at all; if anything, he’s more of a right-winger of the intelligent kind, which makes it all the more interesting. His style is also great and often hilarious. Mind you that he wrote that book in the 90ies, and he also published about toxic feminism back then and so really was ahead of his time.

The book has some lengths, but that’s only because he abuses and tortures Darwinian ideas with so much gusto that sometimes you want to cry out “stop it already! Can’t you see the thing is already dead!?” Not that Darwinism doesn’t deserve it! Heck, the chapter on selfish genes alone is worth the price for the book.

A great thing about the book is that Stove actually read all of Darwin’s works and those of his entourage, predecessors, later apologists and critics. He puts it all into context and often quotes Darwin directly, so there is no weaselling out of his conclusions. What becomes clear is that Darwin himself was very obscure and evasive and never bothered to answer to his critics, which have been numerous and devastating from the very beginning. 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.

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!