Pharyngula

Posted by: Kevin Schreck | July 15, 2009 7:29 PM

If they're going to claim people and statements supporting "intelligent design" before Darwin even conceived of the theory of evolution by natural selection, why not just quote the Bible -- not that I.D. or the Discovery Institute is RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED, or anything...

Posted by: Eyeoffaith | July 15, 2009 7:38 PM

Clearly Stephen Meyer has not read the Rules for Evil Overlords.

Rule 12 is:

One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

Posted by: Michael Fugate | July 15, 2009 7:43 PM

Rob Crowther and Casey Luskin showed at WEIT to tell us all to read Meyer's new book. Which was apparently what the op-ed was all about.
Seems vaguely like issues surrounding another recently published book, but
Meyer's is likely to provide even less evidence.

Posted by: rrt | July 15, 2009 7:44 PM

I would at least offer Meyer a token defense by pointing out that the Jefferson quote could be interpreted as supporting the concept of a created universe by claiming design is observable. But as PZ says, trying to claim that statement means a damn thing about evolution and ID is ludicrously, indefensibly stupid.

Posted by: Travis | July 15, 2009 7:47 PM

So, was the Boston Globe always willing to print something like this, or have they just gone downhill? I do not know a lot of many American newspapers but I do know the name of these one at least and realise it is a large one.

Posted by: arensb | July 15, 2009 7:52 PM

By the way, even if the DI had Jefferson's revivified head in a jar, and it was making anti-evolutionary pronouncements, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to evolutionary biologists. Doctors might be excited, though.

Shh! You're giving away the plot of an upcoming Futurama episode!

Posted by: MadScientist | July 15, 2009 7:54 PM

I would like to add that Jefferson does *NOT* write there is "intelligent design"; he says the universe is awesome and it (in his opinion) is impossible not to be awed and to wonder about a "design, consummate skill, and indefinite power". In Jefferson's opinion it was impossible not to develop a *conviction* - but as even Jefferson understood, a mere conviction may not be true. The gaps were great and god was everywhere. Then of course Darwin came along and said "hey, isn't this awesome - and you know what's even more awesome, this couldn't have been created overnight as the bible says."

It is also difficult to understand that snippet from Jefferson on its own; the context should be known if we are to understand what was actually claimed and where Jefferson may have been wrong. After all Albert Einstein would talk about the Universe, God, and a Grand Design even though it was clear that Einstein must have had a very different personal idea of what 'god' and the 'grand design' were because they certainly weren't the concepts as understood by any religion of his era - and many theotards still claim that Einstein believed in their god.

Einstein was also greatly annoyed by probabilistic behavior on a quantum level: "god does not play dice!" - and yet he didn't mean a god; Einstein wanted a universe in which everything was tied down to simple and set rules and he didn't want one of the rules to be "throw some dice and see" - and yet to the best of human knowledge the universe doesn't care to follow Einstein's wishes in this case.

So, with Einstein at any rate, "god" doesn't really mean "God". Nor is this frustrating use of "god" a recent development; we know Baruch Spinoza (17th century) had such a god and agnostics who preceeded him by over 800 years may have had similar notions of 'god'. We need to be careful about what people, including Jefferson, may have meant by 'god', so god quotes shouldn't be stripped of their context.

Posted by: truthspeaker | July 15, 2009 7:56 PM

Since Thomas Jefferson also supported slavery, I expect Meyer will be endorsing slavery in an upcoming editorial.

Posted by: littlejohn | July 15, 2009 8:01 PM

Have these idiots never heard of the Jefferson Bible? Are they unaware that Washington refused communion? Have they never read the Treaty of Tripoli, issued during the (first) Adams administration, written by Washington, and approved by the entire Senate?

They simply can't get away with claiming the Founders. But they try, good gawd they try. And Einstein...don't get me started.

Smart, accormplished people tend to be skeptics. That must drive them crazy. Something is.

Posted by: cag | July 15, 2009 8:02 PM

The timeline is obviously reversed. In the xtian universe the older the thought and more primitive the society that came up with the thought, the greater the truth value. Although the Jefferson quote is only 36 years older than Darwin's 1859 publication, this is enough to make the xtians swoon. Imagine if the quote had been 3000 years old! (Of course in their universe no quote can be older than 6013 years old).

Posted by: Greg Laden | July 15, 2009 8:08 PM

Very nice use of table formatting.

Posted by: God Retardent | July 15, 2009 8:14 PM

DNA functions like a software program. We know that software comes from programmers. Information - whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal - always arises from an intelligent source. So the discovery of digital code in DNA provides a strong scientific reason for concluding that the information in DNA also had an intelligent source.
Jesus fucking H Christ not the old Paley canard again and again,give me a fucking break,give it up Meyers you shit

Posted by: Tongue of Groucho Marx | July 15, 2009 8:20 PM

I agree with Ron Paul, in that the Founding Fathers were absolutely correct in every single matter, and that society has only deteriorated since their time.

Snarking aside, let's assume that Jefferson did believe that certain things would always be too complex to explain. Some of the greatest minds in the world have been wrong about certain matters. Einstein, for example, didn't think that black holes existed, even though the theory of relativity was instrumental in their discovery.

If IDers want to convince people about their rubbish on the basis of, "Look, this genius believes ID!", then they are going to have to search today's greatest minds, and take into account today's theory of evolution, not that during Darwin's time, Mendel's time, or a time where it didn't even fucking exist. When they do search today's greatest minds, their search will be proven fruitless.

Posted by: Skemono | July 15, 2009 8:27 PM

Since Thomas Jefferson also supported slavery, I expect Meyer will be endorsing slavery in an upcoming editorial.

Actually, Jefferson hated slavery and wanted it abolished. He still didn't free his own slaves, though.

He was, however, quite the racist. Clearly, ID is responsible for racism in the world.

Posted by: Kel, OM | July 15, 2009 8:38 PM

That evil overlord site was pretty awesome.

Posted by: arrakis | July 15, 2009 8:43 PM

@Zeno

Jefferson was a proponent of states rights. The Democratic-Republican Party was a forerunner of the Whigs, which eventually became the Republican Party.

The Federalists eventually became the Democratic Party.

Now, to the article. I would think that Jefferson would have welcomed and accepted Darwin's work, as he was a brilliant and open thinker himself. If we could get the two together (Bill and Ted-style), I think that the Discovery Institute would be sorely disappointed.

Posted by: ThatOtherGuy | July 15, 2009 8:57 PM

I was going to point out the existence of this article to you, as I just read it, but you took care of it :)

Posted by: Jim | July 15, 2009 9:04 PM

@ 30.

Yes, but his counter to this statement is to suggest that Jefferson is somehow related to the discovery of DNA.

The real logic he puts forward is this:

Jefferson=design.
DNA=design.

Therefore, Jefferson=DNA, therefore design.

QED

Posted by: Zeno | July 15, 2009 9:21 PM

Arrant nonsense, Arrakis @ #31. Your description of political party origins is hyper-simplified and fundamentally false. Today's Democratic Party is in direct line of descent from Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. You may be confused by the multi-party turmoil of the first half of the 19th century, which saw the rise of several different parties, some of which included split-off factions from the dominant Democratic-Republicans.

The Federalists disbanded during early 1800s, when the Jeffersonians elected a long string of Democratic-Republican presidents (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe). When John Quincy Adams defeated Andrew Jackson for the presidency, despite the latter's popular vote and Electoral College pluralities, there was a split in the Democratic-Republican ranks, to which both rivals had belonged. Jackson carried the bulk of the Jeffersonians with him, while the Adams faction morphed into the National Republicans, a short-lived party that was mostly absorbed into the Whigs. (The Whigs are thus at least two removes from the Jeffersonians and were in opposition to the Democratic Party.) When the Whigs fell apart, the bulk of their members ended up with an anti-slavery fragment of Jackson's Democratic Party as the Republican Party (which nominated John C. Fremont for president in 1856 and succeeded in electing Abraham Lincoln in 1860).

Posted by: Screechy Monkey | July 15, 2009 9:26 PM

Gruesome Rob's Jefferson quotes raise the shocking thought that Jefferson was -- gasp! -- UNCIVIL in his views towards Christianity! We'll have to educate Zombie Jefferson on the ways of Militant Accomodationism.

Then he and Zombie Carl Sagan can wander the land, moaning, "Braaaainss! But respect your right not to have brains eaten!"

Posted by: Susan | July 15, 2009 9:55 PM

*snort* Very good, PZ! Point and laugh, point and laugh. The Boston Globe has some good writers; Meyers isn't one of them.

Posted by: Xenithrys | July 15, 2009 10:16 PM

#40 @ Bevans: "It won't surprise me if we someday see them say that Darwin was a creationist."

I remember a pamphlet thrust in my mailbox that said just that. It's one of the common lies-for-Jesus. They say he repented and retracted all on his deathbed (no evidence for it, but still they try).

My reaction then was the same as to this Jefferson quote: So what? That's authoritarian. Jefferson's allowed to be wrong, so's Darwin. But the evidence ...

Posted by: Jake Basson | July 15, 2009 11:05 PM

agreed with 13,18,32 possibly others...T.J. is making a statement about human minds, not about the universe.

Posted by: Karl Broman | July 15, 2009 11:08 PM

I think this is one of your funniest posts ever, but maybe it's the wine talking.

Posted by: truthspeaker | July 15, 2009 11:32 PM

Posted by: Zeno | July 15, 2009 9:21 PM

Arrant nonsense, Arrakis @ #31. Your description of political party origins is hyper-simplified and fundamentally false. Today's Democratic Party is in direct line of descent from Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. You may be confused by the multi-party turmoil of the first half of the 19th century, which saw the rise of several different parties, some of which included split-off factions from the dominant Democratic-Republicans.

Moreover, the Republican party did not start to portray themselves as pro-states rights until the early 1970s when Nixon adopted the Southern Strategy. Prior to that they had been seen as the more Federalist party, most notably during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The slave-owning states mostly voted for Democratic-Republicans and later Democrats. This states-rights stance crossed from the Democrats to the Republicans along with the segregationists as a result of Nixon's strategy.

In reality, of course, each party is for states rights when it suits their interests and for greater federal control when it suits their interests.

Posted by: GAZZA | July 16, 2009 12:08 AM

This is not to mention that it's a bit dangerous for them to claim DNA = computer program = must have a programmer anyway. I submit Genetic Algorithms as the reason this is not a pursuit they will find fruitful.

Posted by: Mobius | July 16, 2009 12:41 AM

Oh, the stupid. It hurts so.

Using as a reference a man that never even heard the theory of evolution...and while knowledgeable was not even an expert in biology in his day...the mind boggles.

This is so much an appeal to authority that the logical me cringes at the thought. Do these people have no shame? (rhetorical question...of course they don't)

This is one of those time I feel the term "IDiot" for a cdesign proponentsist is very appropriate.

Posted by: Dr. P | July 16, 2009 12:49 AM

@37, Zeno, and # 39 truthpeaker;Thanks, beat me to it;to even look at the geographic distribution of the parties prior to the 1970's implies that this is so.

Posted by: Raiko | July 16, 2009 3:08 AM

What an abundant lot of hogwash. Congrats, Stephen, you exposed yourself and your bible institue as idiots once more.

It's like they never even heard the points made against the 'argument from authority' or the fact that science tends to get revised and updated. Never mind that Jefferson couldn't even have heard of evolution- the whole argument is so fundamentally flawed, I'm baffled as to why anyone would print it, much less PAY for it.

Also, someone mentioned that Stephen Meyer is aware of the problem of Jefferson not having been alive to hear of evolution. It's true - he mentions this little problem in his article and then moves on by ignoring its implications. In other words: being aware of a fundamental flaw in your argument isn't enough - how about reconsidering and working on it? In fact, that he is aware of this makes his article even more annoying and dishonest - or his thinking even dumber, if he should truly believe he has a point.

Posted by: Carl | July 16, 2009 3:37 AM

In one respect Stephen Meyer's article is surprising. The DI was founded in 1994 and this is the argument that they choose to justify ID?! After 15 years this is the best that they can come up with? They should be ashamed of the money and time that they've wasted.

Posted by: XD | July 16, 2009 5:00 AM

#26

Wait, did he really say that DNA contains a digital code?

Someone needs to look up what "digital" means. DNA is neither digital (base 10) or even binary like computer code.

I presume you didn't even look it up on Wikipedia:

DNA comprises a long sequence of four digits (denoted A, C, G, and T), effectively a base-four numeral system. Each of these digits is an organic molecule, known as a nucleotide. DNA is the major system of information transfer from one biological generation to another.

Posted by: DLC | July 16, 2009 5:30 AM

Was not! Nyaaa nyaaa! Darwin didn't write his book yet! Nyaaa! Boogerhead!
[/five-year-old]

Posted by: Demonhype | July 16, 2009 5:41 AM

arrakis:

"Now, to the article. I would think that Jefferson would have welcomed and accepted Darwin's work, as he was a brilliant and open thinker himself. If we could get the two together (Bill and Ted-style), I think that the Discovery Institute would be sorely disappointed.

Thank you ever so much for that. Now I've got an image in my head that won't go away and let me stop laughing.

That would be awesome though.

Posted by: Forbidden Snowlake | July 16, 2009 6:10 AM

Actually, the quote seems to conform with a certain taxon of creationist quotemine: the "seems" = "is" conflation that gave us Darwin's famous "it would seem absurd..." quote from OotS.

"it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design..." is a statement about the human mind, above all else, or so it seems to me.

Posted by: bobxxxx | July 16, 2009 7:11 AM

Of course the Stupidity Institute idiots know Jefferson died long before Darwin published his ideas, but they know their cowardly Christian customers will believe any nonsense to have an excuse to deny reality.

They are insulting Jefferson, who if he was alive today would have nothing but contempt for the Disco Institute assholes.

The good news is the many commenters on the Boston Globe who wrote about the Discovery Institute's dishonesty. Usually Stephen Meyer's bullshit is published on Christian blogs where anyone who calls him a liar gets censored.

Posted by: eveningperson | July 16, 2009 7:28 AM

I went to what was advertised as Dr Meyer's first lecture on his new book, and took some notes. It seemed to me he carried the audience (predominantly Christian creationists) on sheer showmanship, convincing them that he'd refuted the possibility of evolution through natural selection without design, while omitting natural selection entirely from his discussion.

http://eveningperson.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/more-about-stephen-meyers-lecture-on-intelligent-design/

Posted by: John | July 16, 2009 7:37 AM

It's just baffling that supposedly educated people who are interested in making persuasive arguments make such basic errors.

Posted by: Naon Tiotami | July 16, 2009 7:56 AM

I know he's merely an unknown and painless thorn in the massive intellectual flank of PZ Myers, but Cornelius Hunter, a fellow of the Discovery Institute and "Darwin's Predictions" non-fame (http://www.darwinspredictions.com/), has written a response to this post: http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2009/07/more-anti-intellectualism-from-pz-myers.html

I thought you might like to read it and have a chuckle.

And since I'm locked in a one-sided war with Cornelius Hunter (in my mind only), I decided to take him apart myself: http://www.naontiotami.com/?p=703

It took decidedly less balls on my part to do that, I must admit, than it took for Cornelius to try and take PZ apart. I must commend him for his courage, if nothing else.

Posted by: CharmedQuark | July 16, 2009 8:25 AM

Jefferson would hardly have been a supporter of an organization pushing superstition over reason such as the DI.

Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826)
- 3rd U.S. President (1801-1809)
- Louisianna Purchase
- Lewis & Clark Expedition
- second Vice President (1797-1801)
- Governor of Virginia (1779-1781)
- Secretary of State (1789-1793)
- lawyer, scientist, architect (designed Monticello), educator, botanist, archeologist
- primary author of Decleration of Independence
- author of Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786)
(separation of church & state)
- founder of University of Virginia (1825)
- first college to have an elective system of study
- first university to be free of any religious doctrine
- notable for having building centered around a library rather then a church (no campus chapel in original plans)
- campus and buildings designed by Jefferson

"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." 1787 letter to his nephews

“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782.

"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose. " Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." Unknown
"Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies." Unknown"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology" -Thomas Jefferson

"To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus told us indeed that 'God is a spirit,' but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not matter. And the ancient fathers generally, if not universally, held it to be matter: light and thin indeed, an etherial gas; but still matter." letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg

“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own" Letter to H. Spafford, 1814

"...an amendment was proposed by inserting the words, 'Jesus Christ...the holy author of our religion,' which was rejected 'By a great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Infidel of every denomination.'" From Jefferson's biography

"The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible."

"The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites."

Thomas Jefferson said: "Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus."

Posted by: Dan | July 16, 2009 9:03 AM

Take the bible, find a random phrase by Jesus which could seem to be related to evolution and pretend that Jesus was evolutionist! Now, THAT would make for a great conversation with someone from the Discovery Institute.

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | July 16, 2009 9:26 AM

*snort* Very good, PZ! Point and laugh, point and laugh. The Boston Globe has some good writers; Meyers isn't one of them.

Stephan Meyer isn't a Globe writer. He's a Discovery Institute hack.

The Globe does have a couple of decent writers, but we're also cursed with Jeff Jacoby (and poor and dumb man's Jonah Goldberg) and Cathy Young (Libertarian Ladies Against Women...and Everyone Else.)

Posted by: cvt | July 16, 2009 10:12 AM

Here are some other interesting facts: 1) Hippocrates did not support vaccination. 2) Neither Washington nor Lincoln believed in anthropogenic climate change. 3) Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch were not in favor of stem cell research. 4) Isaac Newton did not accept the theory of relativity.

So there!

Posted by: TransitionalForm | July 16, 2009 10:42 AM

Jefferson was far too smart a guy not to have had a eureka moment had it been possible for the arguments of Darwin to be presented. Yes, I am as guilty of the projection just as the Dismal Institute. That goes to show that we all have imaginations and seek patterns.

Posted by: laddlemensch | July 16, 2009 10:49 AM

It's no wonder DI loves Thomas Jefferson. He saw design in the universe and he was a devout Chri-

oh wait

Posted by: Ian Davidson | July 16, 2009 10:54 AM

PZ, timeline aside, Jefferson only said that the human mind perceives and feels a conviction of design. I think that's absolutely true. However, I also think that there is more to reality than the bounds of our human minds, the limits of human perception. Science has shown this to be the case time and time again. I wonder if Jefferson shared this view?

Posted by: Bernard Bumner | July 16, 2009 11:03 AM

However, I also think that there is more to reality than the bounds of our human minds, the limits of human perception. Science has shown this to be the case time and time again.

I think it is worse than you suggest: not only are there limits and bounds to human perception, but human perception is also inconsistent, biased, and unreliable. This is why so much scientific data is surprising and counter-intuitive.

Posted by: gaypaganunitarianagnostic | July 16, 2009 11:45 AM

"...Conjecture of Buffon, Heletius,and Darwin,...that the whole human species is accidentally descended from a remarkable family of monkeys." Irving, Knickerbocker's History of New York, 1809. The Darwin in question is Erasmus, Charles' grandfather.

Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip | July 16, 2009 12:56 PM

@Pierce R. Butler #90: If you think of "better" in the sense of "more marketable", then the analogy holds. It's all in the selection pressure.

Posted by: Dan L. | July 16, 2009 2:55 PM

Talk to any long-term user of Microsoft or Apple software, then get back to us about all this, please.

Not all refactors are 100% successful and new features and enhancements are rarely bug-free. Also, just as in biological evolution, "good enough" can be a very stable solution. Should Microsoft expend a whole lot of money and energy tightening up Windows when they already have an 80% or better market share? Similarly, species that already dominate their ecosystems only need to evolve enough to stay on top of their competition.

Posted by: cag | July 16, 2009 4:16 PM

Spiv @#82. It would do no good. None of them actually read bibles.

Posted by: H.G.White | July 17, 2009 11:18 AM

"Do we not therefore perceive that by the action of the laws of organization . . . nature has in favorable times, places, and climates multiplied her first germs of animality, given place to developments of their organizations, . . . and increased and diversified their organs? Then. . . aided by much time and by a slow but constant diversity of circumstances, she has gradually brought about in this respect the state of things which we now observe. How grand is this consideration, and especially how remote is it from all that is generally thought on this subject!"
Text of a lecture given by Lamarck at the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, May 1803

Lamarck's scientific theories were largely ignored or attacked during his lifetime; Lamarck never won the acceptance and esteem of his colleagues Buffon and Cuvier, and he died in poverty and obscurity. Today, the name of Lamarck is associated merely with a discredited theory of heredity, the "inheritance of acquired traits." However, Charles Darwin, Lyell, Haeckel, and other early evolutionists acknowledged him as a great zoologist and as a forerunner of evolution. Charles Darwin wrote in 1861:

Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801. . . he first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all changes in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition.

Do you think it may be possible that Jefferson was responding a perception of current scientific thought and its improbability.(in his judgement) One cannot be sure what he might have said with respect to Darwinism any more than we might anticipate our responce to some 2012 discovery. He was a supporter of Intelligent Design, notwithstanding.

The real issue is not so much who accepts one position or another but rather that intelligent conversation take place. The blatant ass who holds either "macroevolution" or a "six day creation" up as some absolute to be worshiped need only study recent history to see how that so many absolutes have much less so now. Take a deep breath and relax!

Posted by: Olaf Ingjaldsson | July 17, 2009 11:07 PM

Perhaps if you actually read the article other than to critique you might find Meyer's viewpoint rather refreshing. He was well aware of the history, as you may well know (perhaps not) - otherwise, a shameful sloppy reading on your part with a response of the same fiber.

Home / Globe / Opinion / Op-ed Stephen C. Meyer

Jefferson’s support for intelligent design
(Christophe Vorlet Illustration)

By Stephen C. Meyer
July 15, 2009

IN THE battle over how to teach evolution in public schools, Thomas Jefferson’s demand for a “separation between church and state’’ has been cited countless times. Many argue that the controversial alternative to Darwinian evolution, intelligent design, is an exclusively religious idea and therefore cannot be discussed under the Constitution. By invoking Jefferson’s principle of separation, many critics of intelligent design assume that this visionary Founding Father would agree with them.

But would he? For too long, an aspect of Jefferson’s visionary thought has been ignored, hidden away as too uncomfortable for public discussion - his support for intelligent design.

In 1823, when materialist evolutionary ideas had long been circulating, Jefferson wrote to John Adams and insisted that the scientific evidence of design in nature was clear: “I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.’’ It was on empirical grounds, not religious ones, that he took this view.

Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued: “It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.’’

The “ultimate cause’’ and “fabricator of all things’’ that Jefferson invoked was also responsible for the “design’’ of life’s endlessly diverse forms as well as the manifestly special endowments of human beings. Moreover, because the evidence of “Nature’s God’’ was publicly accessible to all and did not depend upon a special appeal to religious authority, Jefferson believed that it provided a basis in reason for the protection of individual liberty. Thus, the Declaration of Independence asserted that humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’’

Of course, many people assume that Jefferson’s views, having been written before Darwin’s “Origin of Species,’’ are now scientifically obsolete. But Jefferson has been vindicated by modern scientific discoveries that Darwin could not have anticipated. For example, in 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery. The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions - the information - for building the crucial protein molecules and machines the cell needs to survive. Francis Crick later developed this idea with his famous “sequence hypothesis,’’ according to which the chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. As Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.’’

Stephen C. Meyer is director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His new book is “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.’’

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted by: Olaf Ingjaldsson | July 17, 2009 11:12 PM

Perhaps if you actually read the article other than to critique you might find Meyer's viewpoint rather refreshing. He was well aware of the history, as you may well know (perhaps not) - otherwise, a shameful sloppy reading on your part with a response of the same fiber.

Home / Globe / Opinion / Op-ed Stephen C. Meyer

Jefferson’s support for intelligent design
(Christophe Vorlet Illustration)

By Stephen C. Meyer
July 15, 2009
Email| Print| Reprints| Yahoo! Buzz| ShareThisText size – + IN THE battle over how to teach evolution in public schools, Thomas Jefferson’s demand for a “separation between church and state’’ has been cited countless times. Many argue that the controversial alternative to Darwinian evolution, intelligent design, is an exclusively religious idea and therefore cannot be discussed under the Constitution. By invoking Jefferson’s principle of separation, many critics of intelligent design assume that this visionary Founding Father would agree with them.

Discuss
COMMENTS (231)
But would he? For too long, an aspect of Jefferson’s visionary thought has been ignored, hidden away as too uncomfortable for public discussion - his support for intelligent design.

In 1823, when materialist evolutionary ideas had long been circulating, Jefferson wrote to John Adams and insisted that the scientific evidence of design in nature was clear: “I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.’’ It was on empirical grounds, not religious ones, that he took this view.

Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued: “It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.’’

The “ultimate cause’’ and “fabricator of all things’’ that Jefferson invoked was also responsible for the “design’’ of life’s endlessly diverse forms as well as the manifestly special endowments of human beings. Moreover, because the evidence of “Nature’s God’’ was publicly accessible to all and did not depend upon a special appeal to religious authority, Jefferson believed that it provided a basis in reason for the protection of individual liberty. Thus, the Declaration of Independence asserted that humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’’

Of course, many people assume that Jefferson’s views, having been written before Darwin’s “Origin of Species,’’ are now scientifically obsolete. But Jefferson has been vindicated by modern scientific discoveries that Darwin could not have anticipated. For example, in 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery. The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions - the information - for building the crucial protein molecules and machines the cell needs to survive. Francis Crick later developed this idea with his famous “sequence hypothesis,’’ according to which the chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. As Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.’’

Stephen C. Meyer is director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His new book is “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.’’

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted by: Steve_C | July 17, 2009 11:30 PM

Idjit.

Posted by: John Morales | July 17, 2009 11:49 PM

Kel, hate to say it, but adding context doesn't change my perception of what Gates was expressing.

Posted by: Kel, OM | July 18, 2009 12:22 AM

Kel, hate to say it, but adding context doesn't change my perception of what Gates was expressing.

Gates wasn't talking about genetics at all, but of the value of good teaching. Meyer is using it and the name of Bill Gates for his hypothesis: "it's all too complex, therefore Goddidit" It's using someone's words and the authority of that person taken out of context to emphasise a point. If that is not quotemining, then I don't know what is.

Posted by: muckpeas | July 18, 2009 9:26 AM

Not only is Stephen Meyer on the loose, so is "Expelled" co-writer Kevin Miller. Looks like he has a new documentary coming out: http://kevinwrites.typepad.com/otherwise_known_as_kevin_/2009/07/check-out-the-trailer-for-my-next-documentary.html

Posted by: Larsen E. Whipsnade | July 19, 2009 1:05 AM

Your ramblings are simply not only annoying but they are quite beyond hope. They are as expert-wannabes,pseudo-scientists and quasi-intellectuals all aiming at Meyer like a dormant rumba of gregarious cyberspitting cobras summoned by the mere phrase, "intelligent design". They regurgitate bits and pieces of verbiage into the blog like partially masticated bits of corn and hot dogs immensely offensive in odor and stinging with acidic rancor and arrogance. So much heat and no light. You do not want intelligent discussion let alone intelligent discussion on "Intelligent design". Anyone with a modicum of intelligence will avoid this blog , Sir. I wish you all the best on your next attempt to ridicule without reading to understand.

On Second Thought: Is this what is meant by ‘Intelligent Design’?
Written by Joanna Ecke
Saturday, 18 July 2009 00:00

Why do people insist on talking garbage in the face of loss? Do they — or we, I mean — really think that life gives us what we need, that everything happens for a reason, that we emerge stronger in the broken places? That it is all onward and upward? To me bromides of this or any kind seem wrong. Since I live in a small town, I occasionally trick myself into believing that by keeping my own little nose clean, the Universe will let me be. Whom am I kidding?

In the past week, in this little town, friends of ours have lost both brothers and boyhood friends. One minute they were there, the next, gone, and forever. Being low key won’t protect you, and being a good person won’t protect you. In this little town, a man whom everyone likes a great deal laments the death of his son a year ago for which no one has come forward to take responsibility. A parent should not outlive his child — it’s not normal, they say. With that bromide, if that is what it is, I wholeheartedly agree, but I wonder whether loss is the norm, after all, and that we are whistling in the dark.

When our child died a few years ago, someone told me with great assurance that God gives us problems in order to change us for the better. What cruel nonsense! Such a deity would be a profligate waster of energy at best — all of that sorrow just to change me and my loved ones? Albert Einstein said that God is mysterious but not cruel, a pronouncement I prefer to the plain old mean version that someone told me in order to cheer me up, of all things. Cheer doesn’t come so easily to those of us who look closely.

Intelligent design in the universe makes little sense when I am in this mood, but entropy is tremendously convincing — the running down and dissolution of things we took for granted. Who taught me to think darkly like this? Robert Frost, of course. As much as I would like to take Mary Oliver or Billy Collins as my literary guides, I side with grumpy old RF every day of my life.

Here we are in a little window of perfection at the beginning of July. It hasn’t rained today, and, as a result, I, like you, am more than usually sanguine about life and its possibilities. If only I could shut out the sounds of those sirens early in the morning on July 4 weekend and the knowledge that a person I knew and saw often and liked the look of and admired had died. Just like that.

I think about that grieving father whose own life has been a dead thing for a year. Why do such things happen to us? I don’t know. Frost wouldn’t say, but he did get down on his hands and knees 75 years ago and, looking closely at a flower by the road, wondered whether he had seen the ticking of the universe in miniature.

‘Design’

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?—

If design govern in a thing so small.

—Robert Frost

Dr. Ecke, a retired teacher, lives on Ruscoe Road.

Posted by: John Morales | July 19, 2009 5:28 AM

Anyone with a modicum of intelligence will avoid this blog , Sir.

Must be hard going through life with but a modicum of intelligence.

You have my condolences.

Bye.

Posted by: Kel, OM | July 19, 2009 6:37 AM

For those who are interested, this is the Ken Miller lecture I was referring to. It really is excellent viewing, well worth the watch.

Better stop singing Ken Miller's praises otherwise PZ will get his horde to lambaste me for putting up a "creationist" and channelling the Ghost of Kwok. Time to put my feet up and open op Only A Theory, that will show you, you evil atheist militant fundamentalist PZ!!! ;)

Posted by: Bernard Bumner | July 19, 2009 7:28 AM

The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code... As Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created."

Not only is this kind of quote mining (deliberately or not) dishonest, it also serves to illustrate that the quoter doesn't really understand genetics beyond a clumsy analogy (or that they hold their targets in such contempt as to expect them not to see through the sleight).

DNA is not really like a computer programme, not even a very complex one. Not structurally, not functionally, other than in the broadest terms (under which we may also describe it as a blueprint or a recipe).

The analogy has limited use when communicating with younger students, but it is also somewhat damaging because it tends to carry baggage. Software tends to imply the idea of purpose or design, it also fails to convey the oddness of the genome (e.g. the functional oddness, the redundacy, the large amounts of non-functional DNA, the importance of structure and packaging of DNA), and it also tends to inculcate the idea of DNA being all that is required to make an organism. (It reduces every post-genomic function to some sort of downstream action of the DNA itself. So the organism starts to seem like some kind of DNA-driven biological robot - a crude and not very useful idea.)

It is quite possible to have some degree of familiarity with the mechanics of genetics (in a textbook sense), but to be held back by this concept of DNA as software.

Posted by: rich_lsu | July 19, 2009 8:16 PM

Wow! I just got banned from the Fox Nation forum of "Thomas Jefferson's Support for Intelligent Design" for teaching Science 101 and actually making some ID proponents think a little bit.

Posted by: Cuthbert J Twillie | July 19, 2009 9:48 PM

Posted by: Kel, OM | July 19, 2009 6:26 AM
"What is the scientific evidence for intelligent design? What could be used to falsify the claims, what could be used to validate the claims? Where is the experimental support for intelligent design? Until ID actually has that, then of course it is going to be mocked because it is ideology; rebranded creationism where the movement is about subverting the separation of church and state as opposed to furthering humanity's understanding of nature.

Come on Kel, even those scientists who are totally convinced of the 'fact' of evolution admit that a similar dilemma plagues them in secret. The origin of simple life and the molecular chemistry required for an organism to be simply does, at present,require an exercise in faith. If this were not so Chandra Wickramasinghe, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy at Cardiff University and Sir Fred Hoyle would not have embraced the notion of "Panspermia", would they? Would the eminent scientist, Francis Crick ever have written that, "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going", unless he along with many others recognize a faith element to "abiogenesis". Give us all a fucking break and be honest! I am so sick of garbage by both extremes. Sheesh.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself | July 19, 2009 10:20 PM

Incidentally, Cuthbert, you are aware that abiogenesis is not evolution. Or are you another ID/creationist who doesn't actually have a clue about what evolution is all about except that your religious masters have told you that "it's a bad thing"?

Posted by: Kel, OM | July 19, 2009 10:42 PM

Come on Kel, even those scientists who are totally convinced of the 'fact' of evolution admit that a similar dilemma plagues them in secret. The origin of simple life and the molecular chemistry required for an organism to be simply does, at present,require an exercise in faith.

You do realise that evolution is about the diversity of life and not the origin of life, right? Because the theory of evolution doesn't explain how life began. You might as well say that plate tectonics is in crisis because we don't know how the earth formed, or that nucleosynthesis is bunk because the nebula hypothesis isn't complete. Hell, if you want to look back far enough, the big bang is still missing mechanisms for the first 10^-35th of a second. How does evolution account for life when we don't know how supersymmetry breaks?!?

But in all seriousness, abiogenesis != evolution. Evolution explains the means by which endless forms most beautiful gain their unique and complex traits. It's how life diversifies and adapts to the environment they are in. It explains how humanity like all other species came to be from one form (or maybe a few). However, it does not explain the origin of life. How organic compounds came to be replicating protocells (the point where evolution would have started) is still being discovered. There's been a lot of process in the area over the last 50 years, including major steps forward in the last couple, but there's still a lot unknown.

As for evolution, we have observed the mechanisms involved. We have observed how mutations arise, how variation is selected against, and how that leads to adaptation. We've even observed all the different stages that lead to speciation, and thus creating a reproductive barrier preventing the transmission of genes from one organism to another.

So the questions I was asking is how Intelligent Design fits into the framework of life. What exactly does the designer do and how can we test for it? Evolutionary theory has precise mechanisms, experimentally refined and verified through more than 150 years of testing by millions of scientists. We've observed the mechanisms in action countless times. What does ID have to offer? Are you seriously going to work on this notion of a god-of-the-gaps whereby the gap is something that evolution isn't even supposed to explain?!?

Give us all a fucking break and be honest! I am so sick of garbage by both extremes. Sheesh.

Here's some honesty for you. The next time you want to be self-righteous, how about you actually read up on the topics at hand? The fact that you confused the origin of life with the diversification of life shows that you do not know what you are talking about or have any understanding of why the scientific community outright rejects intelligent design at the sametime as overwhelmingly supporting evolution.

If you actually had the honesty that you profess us "extremists" must have, surely you would actually do your homework. See what the issues at hand are. Because if you are framing ID as the origin of life and not the diversification, then you aren't pushing Intelligent Degisn as an alternative to evolution; rather as a form of abiogenesis.

Posted by: Feynmaniac | July 19, 2009 11:39 PM

Cuthbert J Twit

Come on Kel, even those scientists who are totally convinced of the 'fact' of evolution admit that a similar dilemma plagues them in secret.

The old "in secret they are really doubtful, I can't provide evidence, but I can say it" approach of kooks.

The origin of simple life and the molecular chemistry required for an organism to be simply does, at present,require an exercise in faith.

No, no it doesn't, not if by faith you mean accepting something without or despite the evidence. Yeah we don't know the exactly how life originated because it is thought to have occurred about 4 billion years ago, which is a really long fucking time. However, the experiments have shown that it is possible to form the basic components of life in early Earth conditions. A tentative hypothesis consistent with the data =/= faith.

Also, as others have already mentioned, evolution describes what happens after life started. If we found out that life actually came from another planet or that was planted by advanced aliens (both of which I find doubtful) then the theory of evolution would still be valid.

If this were not so Chandra Wickramasinghe, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy at Cardiff University and Sir Fred Hoyle would not have embraced the notion of "Panspermia", would they?

*gasp*
Scientists disagree with one another ?!!111! eleventy!
Even scientists that are working outside of their field of expertise!
I need to lie down.

Give us all a fucking break and be honest! I am so sick of garbage by both extremes

One side is backed by empirical evidence and rationality and the other by the magic book of Jewish fairy tales. They must be equal!!1!

Posted by: Augustus Q Winterbottom | July 20, 2009 12:49 AM

How Is It Possible to Believe In God?
William F. Buckley, Jr. - New York, New York
As heard on NPR’s Morning Edition, May 23, 2005

In considering the glories of the world around him, writer and conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. finds it easier to believe in a divine creator than in the vagaries of nature.

I’ve always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, “How is it possible to believe in God?” The imperishable answer was, “I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.”

That rhetorical bullet has everything — wit and profundity. It has more than once reminded me that skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious — indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief — how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration — near infinite — of natural impulses? Yes, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature’s molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?

The skeptics get away with fixing the odds against the believer, mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable — you see? — by the belief that there was a cause for them, always deducible. But how can one deduce the cause of Hamlet? Or of St. Matthew’s Passion? What is the cause of inspiration?

This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature. As a child, I was struck by the short story. It told of a man at a bar who boasted of his rootlessness, derisively dismissing the jingoistic patrons to his left and to his right. But later in the evening, one man speaks an animadversion on a little principality in the Balkans and is met with the clenched fist of the man without a country, who would not endure this insult to the place where he was born.

So I believe that it is as likely that there should be a man without a country, as a world without a creator.

William F. Buckley, Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955 and was its editor for many years. As a conservative commentator, he was the host of the long-running public television program “Firing Line." Buckley is also the author of the acclaimed series of Blackford Oakes spy novels.

Posted by: Steve_C | July 20, 2009 1:03 AM

Ah fuck. Really? Buckley? Damn that's tiresome prancing. Please don't cut and paste that tripe.

Posted by: Otis J Criblecoblis | July 20, 2009 1:12 AM

My Introduction to: The Origin of Life: Theories on the Origin of Biological Order by Duane Gish, Ph.D.

Much of what Dr. Gish published in 1972 is still relevant today. One might take issue with his monkey on typewriter metaphor;however, without such a mental image, it is extremely difficult to grasp the immensity of the probabilities involved. It is not so much that evolutionists hold to certain hypotheses and theories on the origin of life which present as incompatible with the Intelligent Design position that is so annoying to agnostics and others. Rather, it is their unashamed dogmatic assertions and vocal intolerance of any other hypotheses or theories which suggest possibilities outside of "Macroevolution". For example Richard Dawkins, while he mocks the position that Intelligent Design may be a "reasonable conclusion" for the sincere observer of data in nature ( if one suggests that it might point to a Creator a.k.a. God) : he is quite comfortable with the same conclusion " if and only if " the observer adopts some variation of a Panspermia hypothesis. i.e. (Life on Earth was seeded from somewhere in the Universe after having evolved through some natural selection process elsewhere.) " Intelligent Designers", I might add, interpret data in much the same way; however, from a different a priori "frame of reference." In my judgment, both polar positions making assertions in phrases other than carefully couched comments are telegraphing their own person cognitive dissonance.

Dr. David Berlinskis was asked, " What do you think accounts for these sentimental connections (meaning the unmerited loyalty to the evolutionary paradigm), as you put it …" He responded as with, "Fashion, for one thing. It’s what everyone seems to be saying in the faculty dining room at Mongaheela State Community College, or at The New York Review of Books, much the same environment, now that I think about it. A good deal of this is changing, I should hasten to add, as academics prepared to sneer at religious experience or moral absolutes remember just who happens to pay their salaries. This consideration alone has a wonderfully clarifying effect on one’s theoretical commitments." And finally when pressed, " If Darwinism is so unworthy of respect, what is the appeal of Darwinism? After all, a great many scientists disagree with you. They can’t all be fools, after all…" he responded, " I’m not sure why not."

** Dr. Duane T. Gish is the Vice President of ICR. Dr. Gish has degrees from both U.C.L.A. and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D., Biochemistry), as well as 18 years experience in biochemical and biomedical research at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the Upjohn Company.

The Origin of Life: Theories on the Origin of Biological Order
by Duane Gish, Ph.D.

The second article of this series included a discussion of Fox's scheme, or thermal model, for overcoming the thermodynamic barrier to the formation of proteins (amino acid polymers), and a discussion of other polymerization schemes. It was pointed out that Fox's thermal model involves a series of conditions and events, most of which would have had such a vanishingly low order of probability on any plausible primitive earth, that the overall probability of protenoid microspheres arising through natural processes would have been nil. It was further pointed out that, in any case, the polymers produced by such a postulated process would have consisted of randomly arranged amino acids with no significant biological activity and thus Fox's model has no relevance to the origin of living systems.

The problem of overcoming the thermodynamic barrier in the polymerization of amino acids and nucleotides, as insolvable as this appears to be, is dwarfed by a vastly greater problem—the origin of the highly ordered, highly specific sequences in proteins, DNA, and RNA which endow these molecules with their marvelous biological activities. Proteins generally have from about a hundred up to several hundred amino acids arranged in a precise order or sequence. Twenty different kinds of amino acids are found in proteins, so it may be said that the protein "language" has twenty letters. Just as the letters of the alphabet must be arranged in a precise sequence to write this sentence, or any sentence, so the amino acids must be arranged in a precise sequence for a protein to possess biological activity.

Human growth hormone has 188 amino acids arranged in a unique and precise sequence. Ribonuclease, an enzyme that catalyzes the hydrolysis of ribonucleic acids (RNA), has 124 amino acids arranged in its own unique sequence. Bovine glutamate dehydrogenase, another enzyme, has six identical chains of 506 amino acids each. The alpha chain of human hemoglobin, the red blood protein, has 141 amino acids, and the beta chain has 146 amino acids. Hemoglobin is a complex which includes four protein molecules, two each of the alpha and beta proteins, plus iron, plus a complex chemical called heme.

The particular amino acid sequence of each of these protein molecules is responsible for their unique biological activity. Furthermore, a change of a single amino acid generally destroys or severely diminishes this activity. For example, some individuals inherit a defective gene which causes the amino acid valine to be substituted for glutamic acid at position 6 in the beta chain of their hemoglobin. The other 286 amino acids (the remaining 145 in the beta chain and the 141 in the alpha chain) remain unchanged—only one out of 287 amino acids is affected. The defect, however, causes sickle cell anemia, a disease that is invariably fatal.

The genetic messages are encoded in the genes, which are composed of DNA, via the specific sequence of the nucleotides. There are four different nucleotides, but each "letter" of the genetic "language" consists of a set of three of the four nucleotides. Sixty-four such sets (43) can be derived from these four nucleotides, and thus the genetic "language" has an alphabet of 64 "letters." Genes generally have from a hundred or so of these sets up to several thousand of the sets. This would require the precise ordering of three times that many nucleotides, since there are three in each set. The various kinds of RNA would have equal complexity.

As mentioned earlier in the section of the last article in this series, in which Fox's scheme was being discussed, when amino acids and nucleotides are combined, or polymerized, by chemical methods, the amino acids in polypeptides (proteins) and the nucleotides in polynucleotides (DNA and RNA) so derived are arranged in disordered, or random sequences, just as a string of letters typed by a monkey would be randomly arranged. For biologically active molecules to have arisen on the earth by naturalistic processes, there would have had to be some machinery or mechanism in existence to cause ordering of the subunits in a precise or nearly precise fashion.

The ordering mechanism would have had to be highly efficient, since the precise structures required for biological activity impose the severest restraints on the structures of these molecules, just as writing this sentence correctly allows one way, and one way only, for the letters composing it to be arranged. No such ordering mechanism has yet been suggested, nor could any exist under natural conditions. Once ordered sequences, such as enzymes, DNA and RNA, as well as complex energy-coupling and energy-generating systems existed, one might imagine how these ordered sequences could have been duplicated, but that would never explain the origin of these ordered sequences in the first place.

Some have imagined that random processes, given the four or five billion years postulated by evolutionists for the age of the earth, could have generated certain ordered sequences by pure chance. The time required for a single protein molecule to arise by pure chance, however, would exceed billions of times five billion years, the assumed age of the earth.

For example, only seventeen different amino acids (one of each) can be arranged in over 355 trillion (17 factorial) different ways. Put another way, 17 people could line up over 355 trillion different ways (if you don't believe it, get 16 friends together and try it!). Furthermore, if one were to arrange a sequence of 17 amino acids, and could choose from 20 (the number of different amino acids found in proteins) instead of 17, and were allowed to repeat amino acids (as would have been the case in the origin of proteins), about ten sextillion sequences could be obtained (2017, or 1022)!

Immense as these numbers are, it could be argued that their origin even by completely random processes would have a finite probability in five billion years. But 17 is far too short for biological activity. Proteins, DNA, and RNA usually contain hundreds of subunits. A sequence of 100 might be more realistic. One hundred amino acids of 20 different kinds could be arranged in 20100, or 10130 different ways. What would be the probability of one unique sequence of 100 amino acids, composed of 20 different amino acids, arising by chance in five billion years?

Let it be illustrated in the following fashion. The number of different ways the letters in a sentence containing 100 letters of 20 different kinds could be arranged would be equal to the number of different protein molecules just mentioned (10130). A monkey typing 100 letters every second for five billion years would not have the remotest chance of typing a particular sentence of 100 letters even once without spelling errors.

In fact, if one billion (109) planets the size of the earth were covered eyeball-to-eyeball and elbow-to-elbow with monkeys, and each monkey was seated at a typewriter (requiring about 10 square feet for each monkey, of the approximately 1016 square feet available on each of the 109 planets), and each monkey typed a string of 100 letters every second for five billion years (about 1017 seconds) the chances are overwhelming that not one of these monkeys would have typed the sentence correctly! Only 1041 tries could be made by all these monkeys in that five billion years (109 x 1016 x 1017 divided by 10 = 1041). There would not be the slightest chance that a single one of the 1024 monkeys (a trillion trillion monkeys) would have typed a preselected sentence of 100 letters (such as "The subject of this Impact article is the naturalistic origin of life on the earth under assumed primordial conditions") without a spelling error, even once.

The number of tries possible (1041) is such a minute fraction of the total number of possibilities (10130), that the probability that one of the monkeys would have typed the correct sentence is less than the impossibility threshold. The degree of difference between these two numbers is enormous, and may be illustrated by the fact that 1041 times a trillion(1012) is still only 1053, and 1053 times a trillion is only 1065, 1065 times a trillion is only 1077, etc. In fact, 1041 would have to be multiplied by a trillion more than seven times to equal 10130. Even after 1041 tries had been made, there would still be much, much more than 10129 arrangements that hadn't yet been tried (1041 is such an insignificantly small number compared to 10130 that 10130 - 1041 is about equal to 10130 minus zero!).

Considering an enzyme, then, of 100 amino acids, there would be no possibility whatever that a single molecule could ever have arisen by pure chance on the earth in five billion years. But if by some miracle it did happen once, only a single molecule would have been produced, yet billions of tons of each of many different protein, DNA, and RNA molecules would have to be produced. The probability of this happening, of course, is absolutely nil. It must be concluded, therefore, that a naturalistic origin of the many biologically active molecules required for the most primitive organism imaginable would have been impossible.

Origin of Stable, Complex, Biologically Active Systems

The problem of explaining the manner in which the above macromolecules became associated into systems that would have had even the most rudimentary ability to function as metabolically active systems capable of assuring their own maintenance, reproduction, and diversification is tremendously more complex and difficult than any attempts to explain the origin of the macromolecules themselves. Green and Goldberger have stated, " ... the macromolecule-to-cell transition is a jump of fantastic dimensions, which lies beyond the range of testable hypothesis. In this area all is conjecture. The available facts do not provide a basis for postulating that cells arose on this planet."1 Kerkut, in his little book exposing the fallacies and weaknesses in the evidence usually used to support evolution (although he, himself, is not a creationist) said, "It is therefore a matter of faith on the part of the biologist that biogenesis did occur and he can choose whatever method of biogenesis happens to suit him personally; the evidence for what did happen is not available."2

Nevertheless, there are those who persist in attempts to provide a rational explanation for bridging the vast chasm separating a loose mixture of molecules and a living system. The extent of this chasm is enormous when we view the two extremes — an ocean containing a random mixture of macromolecules — proteins, nucleic acids; carbohydrates) and other molecules essential for life, in contrast to an isolated, highly complex, intricately integrated, enormously efficient, self-maintaining and self-replicating system represented by the simplest living thing.

Assuming that there was, at one time, an ocean full of these marvelous macromolecules that somehow had become endowed with at least some measure of "biological" activity, one must explain, first of all, how these macromolecules disassociated themselves from this dilute milieu and became integrated into some crude, but functional and stable system.

We can say immediately that under no naturally occurring conditions could complex systems spontaneously arise from a random mixture of macromolecules. There is absolutely no tendency for disordered systems to spontaneously self-organize themselves into more ordered states. On the contrary, all systems naturally tend to become less and less orderly. The more probable state of matter is always a random state. Evolution of life theories thus contradict natural laws. Nevertheless, evolutionists persist in speculating that life arose spontaneously.

Oparin's Coacervate Theory

Because of limitation of space, only one theory, that of A. I. Oparin, the Russian biochemist and pioneer in origin of life theories, will be discussed. Most of the basic objections to his theory are applicable to Fox's microspheres and all similar suggestions. Oparin has proposed that coacervates may have been the intermediates between loose molecules and living systems (a review of Oparin's proposals may be found in Kenyon and Steinman3). Coacervates are colloidal particles which form when macromolecules associate with one another and precipitate out of solution in the form of tiny droplets. Complex coacervates are those that form between two different types of macromolecules. For instance, such a coacervate will form between a histone, which is a basic protein, and a nucleic acid, which is acidic. Another example is the coacervate that will form from a complex of gelatin (basic, and thus positively charged) and negatively charged gum arabic.

Oparin, and others, have claimed that complex coacervates possess properties that may have enabled them to form protocells. It was shown that certain coacervates absorbed enzymes from the surrounding medium and that these enzymes were able to function inside the coacervate.4,5 It should be understood, however, that the association of macromolecules to form coacervates, and the absorption of molecules from the surrounding medium, is due to simple chemical and physical phenomena, and is thus not selective, self-organizing or stable. Basic histones and nucleic acids form coacervates simply because one is basic, thus positively charged, and one is acidic, and thus negatively charged. There is a simple electrostatic attraction between the two. Basic histones, of course, would attract any acidic, or negatively charged, particles, and nucleic acids would attract any basic, or positively charged, particles. This attraction would not be selective, and if a chaotic mixture prevailed in the medium, the coacervates would be a chaotic mixture.

Enzyme activity is only useful when it is coordinated with other enzyme activities. We have already given reasons why it would have been impossible for any one particular macromolecule, such as a protein enzyme, to have been formed in any significant amount. But suppose that it did just happen that a few enzyme molecules were absorbed into a coacervate. The action of this enzyme would have been meaningless and useless unless some other enzyme was also present which produced the substrate for the first enzyme, and unless there was another enzyme that could utilize its product. In other words, it would be useless for a coacervate to convert glucose1-phosphate into glucose-6-phosphate unless it also possessed a source of glucose-1-phosphate and unless it could further utilize the glucose-6-phosphate once it was produced. A factory that has no source of raw materials, or which has no market for its product must shut down in a short time. Living systems are extremely complex, having hundreds of series of metabolic pathways perfectly coordinated and controlled. Substrates are passed along these pathways as each enzyme performs its highly specialized chemical task, and coordination in space and time is such that each enzyme is provided with a controlled amount of substrate, and the successive enzyme is there to receive the substrate and in turn to perform its task. Each chemical task performed is useful and purposeful because it is coordinated in a marvelous way with all the other activities of the cell.

Without this coordination, enzyme activity would not only be useless, it would be destructive. Let us assume, for example, that a proteolytic enzyme (this is an enzyme which catalyzes the hydrolysis, or breakdown, of proteins) somehow did arise in the "primordial soup" and this enzyme was absorbed into a coacervate or one of Fox's proteinoid microspheres. The results would be totally disastrous, for the enzyme would "chew up" all the protein in sight, and that would be the end of the coacervate or microsphere! Similarly, a deaminase would indiscriminately deaminate all amines, a decarboxylase would decarboxylate all carboxylic acids, a DNAse would break down all DNA, and an RNAse would break down all RNA. Uncontrolled, uncoordinated enzymatic activity would be totally destructive.

Such control and coordination in a coacervate, microsphere, or other hypothetical system would have been nonexistent. The complex metabolic pathways and control systems found in living things owe their existence to the highly complex structures found only within living things, such as chloroplasts, mitochondria, Golgi bodies, microsomes, and other structures found within the cell. Some of these are enclosed within membranes, and the cell, itself, is of course, enclosed within a very complex, dynamically functioning multi-layered membrane. Control and coordination, absolutely essential to any living thing or to any metabolically active system, could only exist through the agency of complex structures similar to those mentioned above, but they, in turn, can only be produced by complex, metabolically active systems. One could not arise or exist in the absence of the other. They must have coexisted from the beginning, rendering evolutionary schemes impossible.

Another very serious objection to the idea of Oparin's coacervates is their inherent instability. They form only under special conditions, and readily dissolve with dilution, shift in pH, warming, pressure, etc. This instability has been cited by Fox6, by Young7, and by Kenyon and Steinman.8 Instability is a most fundamental objection to any type of system that can be proposed to bridge the gap between molecules and living cells. All of these proposed models, whether they be Oparin's coacervates, Fox's microspheres, or any other model, suffer this basic and fatal weakness. One of the reasons living cells are stable and can persist is that they have membranes that protect the system within the membrane and hold it together. The membrane of a living cell is very complex in structure and marvelous in its function. A coacervate or a protein microsphere may have a pseudomembrane, or a concentration or orientation of material at the point of contact with the surrounding medium that gives it the appearance of having a membrane. There are no chemical bonds linking the macromolecules in this pseudomembrane, however, and it is easily broken up, and the contents of the coacervate or microsphere are then released into the medium.

Since these coacervates have this inherent instability, no coacervate could have existed for a length of time that would have had any significance whatsoever to the origin of life. Even if we could imagine a primitive "soup" concentrated sufficiently in macromolecules to allow coacervates to form, their existence would have been brief. Any organization that may have formed in these coacervates by any imaginable process would then have been irretrievably lost as the contents of the coacervate spilled out into the medium.

Theories that attempt to account for the origin of stable metabolic systems from loose macromolecules thus suffer from a number of fatal weaknesses. First is the requirement that the necessary macromolecules be produced in sufficiently vast amounts to saturate the primeval seas to the point where complex coacervates or protenoid microspheres would precipitate out of solution. Secondly, such globular products are inherently unstable and would easily be dissolved or disintegrated, spilling their contents out into the medium. Geological ages, however, would have been required for a loose system to evolve into a stable, living cell, assuming such a process were possible at all. As we have seen above, however, there is no tendency at all for complex systems to form spontaneously from simple systems. There is a general natural tendency, on the other hand, for organized systems to spontaneously disintegrate to a disordered state. Thirdly, even if it were imagined that a coacervate of some kind could accrete or inherently possess some catalytic ability, this catalytic ability would have been purposeless, and thus useless, and actually destructive.

The Origin of the First Completely Independent, Stable, Self-Reproducing Unit—The First Living Cell

The simplest form of life known to science contains hundreds of different kinds of enzymes, thousands of different kinds of RNA and DNA molecules, and thousands of other kinds of complex molecules. As mentioned above, it is enclosed within a very complex membrane and contains a large number of structures many of which are enclosed within their own membrane. The thousands of chemical reactions which occur in this cell are strictly coordinated with one another in time and space in a harmonious system, all working together towards the self-maintenance and eventual reproduction of this living cell. Every detail of its structure and function reveals purposefulness; its incredible complexity and marvelous capabilities reveal a master plan.

It seems futile enough to attempt to imagine how this amazingly complex system could have come into existence in the first place in view of the vast amount of contradictory evidence. Its continued existence from the very start, however, would have required mechanisms especially designed for self-maintenance and self-reproduction. There are numerous injurious processes which would prove fatal for the cell if repair mechanisms did not exist. These injurious processes include dimerization of the thymine units in DNA, deamination of cytosine, adenine, and guanine in DNA and RNA, deamidation of glutamine and asparagine in proteins, and the production of toxic peroxides, just to cite a few. The cell is endowed with complex, defense mechanisms, in each case involving an enzyme or a series of enzymes. Since these defense mechanisms are absolutely necessary for the survival of the cell, they would have had to exist from the very beginning. Life could not have waited until such mechanisms evolved, for life would be impossible in their absence.

The ultimate fate of a cell or any living thing is death and destruction. No dynamically functioning unit therefore can survive as a species without self-reproduction. The ability to reproduce, however, would have had to exist from the very beginning in any system, no matter how simple or complex, that could have given rise eventually to a living thing. Yet the ability to reproduce requires such a complex mechanism that the machinery required for this process would have been the last thing that could possibly have evolved. This dilemma has no solution and thus poses the final insuperable barrier to the origin of life by a naturalistic process.

We conclude that a materialistic, mechanistic, evolutionary origin of life is directly contradicted by known natural laws and processes. The origin of life could only have occurred through the acts of an omniscient Creator independent of and external to the natural universe. "In the beginning God created" is still the most up-to-date statement we can make concerning the origin of life.
REFERENCES

1 D. E. Green and R. F. Goldberger, Molecular Insights into the Living Process, Academic Press, New York, 1967, p. 407.
2 G. A. Kerkut, Implications of Evolution, Pergamon Press, New York, 1960, p. 150.
3 D. H. Kenyon and G. Steinman, Biochemical Predestination, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1969, p. 245.
4 A. I. Oparin, The Origin of Life on the Earth, Academic Press, New York, 1957, p. 428.
5 A. I. Oparin, in The Origins of Prebiological Systems and of their Molecular Matrices, S. W. Fox, Ed., Academic Press, New York, 1965, p. 331.
6 S. W. Fox in Reference 5, p. 345.
7 R. S. Young in Reference 5, p. 348.
8 Reference 3, p. 250.

* An elaboration of this material in much greater detail may be found in Dr. Gish's monograph, "Speculations and Experiments Related to Theories on the Origin of Life." Creation-Life Publishers, 1972.

** Dr. Duane T. Gish is the Vice President of ICR. Dr. Gish has degrees from both U.C.L.A. and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D., Biochemistry), as well as 18 years experience in biochemical and biomedical research at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the Upjohn Company.

The problem of overcoming the thermodynamic barrier in the polymerization of amino acids and nucleotides, as insolvable as this appears to be, is dwarfed by a vastly greater problem—the origin of the highly ordered, highly specific sequences in proteins, DNA, and RNA which endow these molecules with their marvelous biological activities. Proteins generally have from about a hundred up to several hundred amino acids arranged in a precise order or sequence. Twenty different kinds of amino acids are found in proteins, so it may be said that the protein "language" has twenty letters. Just as the letters of the alphabet must be arranged in a precise sequence to write this sentence, or any sentence, so the amino acids must be arranged in a precise sequence for a protein to possess biological activity.

Posted by: Steve_C | July 20, 2009 1:21 AM

Hey Otis. Don't be a dick. Post a link. Don't cut and paste entire articles. Are you ashamed of the source?

Posted by: Owlmirror | July 20, 2009 1:25 AM

The evolutionists had to contend with, for instance, Phillip E. Johnson, professor emeritus of law at the University of California at Berkeley, who wrote the book Darwin on Trial, and then Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds.

*snerk*

And the nitwit was rather overimpressed by someone who has no expertise in biology or any related field, and who is on the record as acknowledging that ID is not science.

Ha!

To prove absolutely that an apple, dropped from above Johnny’s head, will fall down on it is not the equivalent of proving that no extrinsic force had a hand in setting up that gravitational exercise.

A strangely prescriptive form of describing gravity. Gravity exists, therefore we should drop things on people?

Johnson’s objections have to do with separating real science from the materialist philosophy that provides “the only support for Darwinist theory.

More garbage. Johnson has no real science. Evolutionary biology has evidence.

Did God have a hand in creating all of this? Including the great messes we live with?

Hm. Buckley was a dystheist?

Posted by: Feynmaniac | July 20, 2009 1:35 AM

If you want to make an argument make it in your own words. You can cite and provide short quotations, hell you can even link if you want to. However, this copy-and-paste shit is annoying and is likely to get you banned.

(Why do the wackos always copy and paste?)

Posted by: Mahatma Kane Jeeves | July 20, 2009 1:45 AM

Commentary,Vol. 101, June 1996 No. 6

The Deniable Darwin

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Berlinski
The fossil record is incomplete, the reasoning flawed; is the theory of evolution fit to survive?

David Berlinski, who has taught mathematics and philosophy in American and French universities, is the author, most recently, of A Tour of the Calculus (Pantheon) and of The Body Shop, a novel forthcoming from St. Martin's). His article, "The Soul of Man Under Physics," appeared in our January issue.

Copyright © 1997 David Berlinski. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
File Date: 2.04.00

Charles Darwin presented On the Origin of Species to a disbelieving world in 1859 - three years after Clerk Maxwell had published "On Faraday's Lines of Force," the first of his papers on the electromagnetic field. Maxwell's theory has by a process of absorption become part of quantum field theory, and so a part of the great canonical structure created by mathematical physics.

By contrast, the final triumph of Darwinian theory, although vividly imagined by biologists, remains, along with world peace and Esperanto, on the eschatological horizon of contemporary thought.

"It is just a matter of time," one biologist wrote recently, reposing his faith in a receding hereafter, "before this fruitful concept comes to be accepted by the public as wholeheartedly as it has accepted the spherical earth and the sun-centered solar system." Time, however, is what evolutionary biologists have long had, and if general acceptance has not come by now, it is hard to know when it ever will.

In its most familiar, textbook form, Darwin's theory subordinates itself to a haunting and fantastic image, one in which life on earth is represented as a tree. So graphic has this image become that some biologists have persuaded themselves they can see the flowering tree standing on a dusty plain, the mammalian twig obliterating itself by anastomosis into a reptilian branch and so backward to the amphibia and then the fish, the sturdy chordate line - our line, cosa nostra - moving by slithering stages into the still more primitive trunk of life and so downward to the single irresistible cell that from within its folded chromosomes foretold the living future.

This is nonsense, of course. That densely reticulated tree, with its lavish foliage, is an intellectual construct, one expressing the hypothesis of descent with modification.

Evolution is a process, one stretching over four billion years. It has not been observed. The past has gone to where the past inevitably goes. The future has not arrived. The present reveals only the detritus of time and chance: the fossil record, and the comparative anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry of different organisms and creatures. Like every other scientific theory, the theory of evolution lies at the end of an inferential trail.

The facts in favor of evolution are often held to be incontrovertible; prominent biologists shake their heads at the obduracy of those who would dispute them. Those facts, however, have been rather less forthcoming than evolutionary biologists might have hoped. If life progressed by an accumulation of small changes, as they say it has, the fossil record should reflect its flow, the dead stacked up in barely separated strata. But for well over 150 years, the dead have been remarkably diffident about confirming Darwin's theory. Their bones lie suspended in the sands of time-theromorphs and therapsids and things that must have gibbered and then squeaked; but there are gaps in the graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms but where there is nothing whatsoever instead.1

Before the Cambrian era, a brief 600 million years ago, very little is inscribed in the fossil record; but then, signaled by what I imagine as a spectral puff of smoke and a deafening ta-da!, an astonishing number of novel biological structures come into creation, and they come into creation at once.

Thereafter, the major transitional sequences are incomplete. Important inferences begin auspiciously, but then trail off, the ancestral connection between Eusthenopteron and Ichthyostega, for example - the great hinge between the fish and the amphibia - turning on the interpretation of small grooves within Eusthenopteron's intercalary bones. Most species enter the evolutionary order fully formed and then depart unchanged. Where there should be evolution, there is stasis instead - the term is used by the paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in developing their theory of "punctuated equilibria" - with the fire alarms of change going off suddenly during a long night in which nothing happens.

The fundamental core of Darwinian doctrine, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has buoyantly affirmed, "is no longer in dispute among scientists." Such is the party line, useful on those occasions when biologists must present a single face to their public. But it was to the dead that Darwin pointed for confirmation of his theory; the fact that paleontology does not entirely support his doctrine has been a secret of long standing among paleontologists. "The known fossil record," Steven Stanley observes, "fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid."

Small wonder, then, that when the spotlight of publicity is dimmed, evolutionary biologists evince a feral streak, Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, Richard Dawkins, and John Maynard Smith abusing one another roundly like wrestlers grappling in the dark.

Pause for the Logician
Swimming in the soundless sea, the shark has survived for millions of years, sleek as a knife blade and twice as dull. The shark is an organism wonderfully adapted to its environment. Pause. And then the bright brittle voice of logical folly intrudes: after all, it has survived for millions of years.

This exchange should be deeply embarrassing to evolutionary biologists. And yet, time and again, biologists do explain the survival of an organism by reference to its fitness and the fitness of an organism by reference to its survival, the friction between concepts kindling nothing more illuminating than the observation that some creatures have been around for a very long time. "Those individuals that have the most offspring," writes Ernst Mayr, the distinguished zoologist, "are by definition . . . the fittest ones." And in Evolution and the Myth of Creationism, Tim Berra states that "[f]itness in the Darwinian sense means reproductive fitness-leaving at least enough offspring to spread or sustain the species in nature."

This is not a parody of evolutionary thinking; it is evolutionary thinking. Que sera, sera.

Evolutionary thought is suffused in general with an unwholesome glow. "The belief that an organ so perfect as the eye," Darwin wrote, "could have been formed by natural selection is enough to stagger anyone." It is. The problem is obvious. "What good," Stephen Jay Gould asked dramatically, "is 5 percent of an eye?" He termed this question "excellent."

The question, retorted the Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, the most prominent representative of ultra-Darwinians, "is not excellent at all":

"Vision that is 5 percent as good as yours or mine is very much worth having in comparison with no vision at all. And 6 percent is better than 5, 7 percent better than 6, and so on up the gradual, continuous series."

But Dawkins, replied Phillip Johnson in turn, had carelessly assumed that 5 percent of an eye would see 5 percent as well as an eye, and that is an assumption for which there is little evidence. (A professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, Johnson has a gift for appealing to the evidence when his opponents invoke theory, and vice versa.)

Having been conducted for more than a century, exchanges of this sort may continue for centuries more; but the debate is an exercise in irrelevance. What is at work in sight is a visual system, one that involves not only the anatomical structures of the eye and forebrain, but the remarkably detailed and poorly understood algorithms required to make these structures work.

"When we examine the visual mechanism closely," Karen K. de Valois remarked recently in Science, "although we understand much about its component parts, we fail to fathom the ways in which they fit together to produce the whole of our complex visual perception."

These facts suggest a chastening reformulation of Gould's "excellent" question, one adapted to reality: could a system we do not completely understand be constructed by means of a process we cannot completely specify?

The intellectually responsible answer to this question is that we do not know -- we have no way of knowing. But that is not the answer evolutionary theorists accept. According to Daniel Dennett (in Darwin's Dangerous Idea), Dawkins is "almost certainly right" to uphold the incremental view, because "Darwinism is basically on the right track." In this, he echoes the philosopher Kim Sterenly, who is also persuaded that "something like Dawkins's stories have got to be right" (emphasis added). After all, she asserts, "natural selection is the only possible explanation of complex adaptation."

Dawkins himself has maintained that those who do not believe a complex biological structure may be constructed in small steps are expressing merely their own sense of "personal incredulity." But in countering their animadversions he appeals to his own ability to believe almost anything. Commenting on the (very plausible) claim that spiders could not have acquired their web-spinning behavior by a Darwinian mechanism, Dawkins writes: "It is not impossible at all. That is what I firmly believe and I have some experience of spiders and their webs." It is painful to see this advanced as an argument.

Unflagging Success
Darwin conceived of evolution in terms of small variations among organisms, variations which by a process of accretion allow one species to change continuously into another. This suggests a view in which living creatures are spread out smoothly over the great manifold of biological possibilities, like colors merging imperceptibly in a color chart.

Life, however, is absolutely nothing like this. Wherever one looks there is singularity, quirkiness, oddness, defiant individuality, and just plain weirdness. The male redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti), for example, is often consumed during copulation. Such is sexual cannibalism -- the result, biologists have long assumed, of "predatory females overcoming the defenses of weaker males." But it now appears that among Latrodectus basselti, the male is complicit in his own consumption. Having achieved intromission, this schnook performs a characteristic somersault, placing his abdomen directly over his partner's mouth. Such is sexual suicide-awfulness taken to a higher power.2

It might seem that sexual suicide confers no advantage on the spider, the male passing from ecstasy to extinction in the course of one and the same act. But spiders willing to pay for love are apparently favored by female spiders (no surprise, there); and female spiders with whom they mate, entomologists claim, are less likely to mate again. The male spider perishes; his preposterous line persists.

This explanation resolves one question only at the cost of inviting another: why such bizarre behavior? In no other Latrodectus species does the male perform that obliging somersault, offering his partner the oblation of his life as well as his love. Are there general principles that specify sexual suicide among this species, but that forbid sexual suicide elsewhere? If so, what are they?

Once asked, such questions tend to multiply like party guests. If evolutionary theory cannot answer them, what, then, is its use? Why is the Pitcher plant carnivorous, but not the thorn bush, and why does the Pacific salmon require fresh water to spawn, but not the Chilean sea bass? Why has the British thrush learned to hammer snails upon rocks, but not the British blackbird, which often starves to death in the midst of plenty? Why did the firefly discover bioluminescence, but not the wasp or the warrior ant; why do the bees do their dance, but not the spider or the flies; and why are women, but not cats, born without the sleek tails that would make them even more alluring than they already are?

Why? Yes, why? The question, simple, clear, intellectually respectable, was put to the Nobel laureate George Wald. "Various organisms try various things," he finally answered, his words functioning as a verbal shrug, "they keep what works and discard the rest."

But suppose the manifold of life were to be given a good solid yank, so that the Chilean sea bass but not the Pacific salmon required fresh water to spawn, or that ants but not fireflies flickered enticingly at twilight, or that women but not cats were born with lush tails. What then? An inversion of life's fundamental facts would, I suspect, present evolutionary biologists with few difficulties. Various organisms try various things. This idea is adapted to any contingency whatsoever, an interesting example of a Darwinian mechanism in the development of Darwinian thought itself.

A comparison with geology is instructive. No geological theory makes it possible to specify precisely a particular mountain's shape; but the underlying process of upthrust and crumbling is well understood, and geologists can specify something like a mountain's generic shape. This provides geological theory with a firm connection to reality. A mountain arranging itself in the shape of the letter "A" is not a physically possible object; it is excluded by geological theory.

The theory of evolution, by contrast, is incapable of ruling anything out of court. That job must be done by nature. But a theory that can confront any contingency with unflagging success cannot be falsified. Its control of the facts is an illusion.

Sheer Dumb Luck
Chance alone," the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Jacques Monod once wrote, "is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of creation."

The sentiment expressed by these words has come to vex evolutionary biologists. "This belief," Richard Dawkins writes, "that Darwinian evolution is 'random,' is not merely false. It is the exact opposite of the truth." But Monod is right and Dawkins wrong. Chance lies at the beating heart of evolutionary theory, just as it lies at the beating heart of thermodynamics.

It is the second law of thermodynamics that holds dominion over the temporal organization of the universe, and what the law has to say we find verified by ordinary experience at every turn. Things fall apart. Energy, like talent, tends to squander itself. Liquids go from hot to lukewarm. And so does love. Disorder and despair overwhelm the human enterprise, filling our rooms and our lives with clutter. Decay is unyielding. Things go from bad to worse. And overall, they go only from bad to worse.

These grim certainties the second law abbreviates in the solemn and awful declaration that the entropy of the universe is tending toward a maximum. The final state in which entropy is maximized is simply more likely than any other state. The disintegration of my face reflects nothing more compelling than the odds. Sheer dumb luck.

But if things fall apart, they also come together. Life appears to offer at least a temporary rebuke to the second law of thermodynamics. Although biologists are unanimous in arguing that evolution has no goal, fixed from the first, it remains true nonetheless that living creatures have organized themselves into ever more elaborate and flexible structures. If their complexity is increasing, the entropy that surrounds them is decreasing. Whatever the universe-as-a-whole may be doing -- time fusing incomprehensibly with space, the great stars exploding indignantly -- biologically things have gone from bad to better, the show organized, or so it would seem, as a counterexample to the prevailing winds of fate.

How so? The question has historically been the pivot on which the assumption of religious belief has turned. How so? "God said: 'Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven."' That is how so. And who on the basis of experience would be inclined to disagree? The structures of life are complex, and complex structures get made in this, the purely human world, only by a process of deliberate design. An act of intelligence is required to bring even a thimble into being; why should the artifacts of life be different?

Darwin's theory of evolution rejects this counsel of experience and intuition. Instead, the theory forges, at least in spirit, a perverse connection with the second law itself, arguing that precisely the same force that explains one turn of the cosmic wheel explains another: sheer dumb luck.

If the universe is for reasons of sheer dumb luck committed ultimately to a state of cosmic listlessness, it is also by sheer dumb luck that life first emerged on earth, the chemicals in the pre-biotic seas or soup illuminated and then invigorated by a fateful flash of lightning. It is again by sheer dumb luck that the first self-reproducing systems were created. The dense and ropy chains of RNA -- they were created by sheer dumb luck, and sheer dumb luck drove the primitive chemicals of life to form a living cell. It is sheer dumb luck that alters the genetic message so that, from infernal nonsense, meaning for a moment emerges; and sheer dumb luck again that endows life with its opportunities, the space of possibilities over which natural selection plays, sheer dumb luck creating the mammalian eye and the marsupial pouch, sheer dumb luck again endowing the elephant's sensitive nose with nerves and the orchid's translucent petal with blush.

Amazing. Sheer dumb luck.

Life, Complex Life
Physicists are persuaded that things are in the end simple; biologists that they are not. A good deal depends on where one looks. Wherever the biologist looks, there is complexity beyond complexity, the entanglement of things ramifying downward from the organism to the cell. In a superbly elaborated figure, the Australian biologist Michael Denton compares a single cell to an immense automated factory, one the size of a large city:

On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecule.... We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were, astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery....Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.

And whatever the complexity of the cell, it is insignificant in comparison with the mammalian nervous system; and beyond that, far impossibly ahead, there is the human mind, an instrument like no other in the biological world, conscious, flexible, penetrating, inscrutable, and profound.

It is here that the door of doubt begins to swing. Chance and complexity are countervailing forces; they work at cross-purposes. This circumstance the English theologian William Paley (1743-1805) made the gravamen of his well-known argument from design:

Nor would any man in his senses think the existence of the watch, with its various machinery, accounted for, by being told that it was one out of possible combinations of material forms; that whatever he had found in the place where he found the watch, must have contained some internal configuration or other, and that this configuration might be the structure now exhibited, viz., of the works of a watch, as well as a different structure. It is worth remarking, it is simply a fact, that this courtly and old-fashioned argument is entirely compelling. We never attribute the existence of a complex artifact to chance. And for obvious reasons: complex objects are useful islands, isolated amid an archipelago of useless possibilities. Of the thousands of ways in which a watch might be assembled from its constituents, only one is liable to work. It is unreasonable to attribute the existence of a watch to chance, if only because it is unlikely. An artifact is the overflow in matter of the mental motions of intention, deliberate design, planning, and coordination. The inferential spool runs backward, and it runs irresistibly from a complex object to the contrived, the artificial, circumstances that brought it into being.

Paley allowed the conclusion of his argument to drift from man-made to biological artifacts, a human eye or kidney falling under the same classification as a watch. "Every indication of contrivance," he wrote, "every manifestation of design, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

In this drifting, Darwinists see dangerous signs of a non sequitur. There is a tight connection, they acknowledge, between what a watch is and how it is made; but the connection unravels at the human eye -- or any other organ, disposition, body plan, or strategy -- if only because another and a simpler explanation is available. Among living creatures, say Darwinists, the design persists even as the designer disappears.

"Paley's argument," Dawkins writes, "is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong."

The enormous confidence this quotation expresses must be juxtaposed against the weight of intuition it displaces. It is true that intuition is often wrong-quantum theory is intuition's graveyard. But quantum theory is remote from experience; our intuitions in biology lie closer to the bone. We are ourselves such stuff as genes are made on, and while this does not establish that our assessments of time and chance must be correct, it does suggest that they may be pertinent.

The Book of Life
The Discovery of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1952 revealed that a living creature is an organization of matter orchestrated by a genetic text. Within the bacterial cell, for example, the book of life is written in a distinctive language. The book is read aloud, its message specifying the construction of the cell's constituents, and then the book is copied, passed faithfully into the future.

This striking metaphor introduces a troubling instability, a kind of tremor, into biological thought. With the discovery of the genetic code, every living creature comes to divide itself into alien realms: the alphabetic and the organismic. The realms are conceptually distinct, responding to entirely different imperatives and constraints. An alphabet, on the one hand, belongs to the class of finite combinatorial objects, things that are discrete and that fit together in highly circumscribed ways. An organism, on the other hand, traces a continuous figure in space and in time. How, then, are these realms coordinated?

I ask the question because in similar systems, coordination is crucial. When I use the English language, the rules of grammar act as a constraint on the changes that I might make to the letters or sounds I employ. This is something we take for granted, an ordinary miracle in which I pass from one sentence to the next, almost as if crossing an abyss by means of a series of well-placed stepping stones.

In living creatures, things evidently proceed otherwise. There is no obvious coordination between alphabet and organism; the two objects are governed by different conceptual regimes, and that apparently is the end of it. Under the pressures of competition, the orchid Orphrys apifera undergoes a statistically adapted drift, some incidental feature in its design becoming over time ever more refined, until, consumed with longing, a misguided bee amorously mounts the orchid's very petals, convinced that he has seen shimmering there a female's fragile genitalia. As this is taking place, the marvelous mimetic design maturing slowly, the orchid's underlying alphabetic system undergoes a series of random perturbations, letters in its genetic alphabet winking off or winking on in a way utterly independent of the grand convergent progression toward perfection taking place out there where the action is.

We do not understand, we cannot re-create, a system of this sort. However it may operate in life, randomness in language is the enemy of order, a way of annihilating meaning And not only in language, but in any language-like system -- computer programs, for example. The alien influence of randomness in such systems was first noted by the distinguished French mathematician M.P. Schutzenberger, who also marked the significance of this circumstance for evolutionary theory. "If we try to simulate such a situation," he wrote, "by making changes randomly . . . on computer programs, we find that we have no chance . . . even to see what the modified program would compute; it just jams.3

Planets of Possibility
This is not yet an argument, only an expression of intellectual unease; but the unease tends to build as analogies are amplified. The general issue is one of size and space, and the way in which something small may be found amidst something very big.

Linguists in the 1950's, most notably Noam Chomsky and George Miller, asked dramatically how many grammatical English sentences could be constructed with 100 letters. Approximately 10 to the 25th power, they answered. This is a very large number. But a sentence is one thing; a sequence, another. A sentence obeys the laws of English grammar; a sequence is lawless and comprises any concatenation of those 100 letters. If there are roughly (1025) sentences at hand, the number of sequences 100 letters in length is, by way of contrast, 26 to the 100th power. This is an inconceivably greater number. The space of possibilities has blown up, the explosive process being one of combinatorial inflation.

Now, the vast majority of sequences drawn on a finite alphabet fail to make a statement: they consist of letters arranged to no point or purpose. It is the contrast between sentences and sequences that carries the full, critical weight of memory and intuition. Organized as a writhing ball, the sequences resemble a planet-sized object, one as large as pale Pluto. Landing almost anywhere on that planet, linguists see nothing but nonsense. Meaning resides with the grammatical sequences, but they, those sentences, occupy an area no larger than a dime.

How on earth could the sentences be discovered by chance amid such an infernal and hyperborean immensity of gibberish? They cannot be discovered by chance, and, of course, chance plays no role in their discovery. The linguist or the native English-speaker moves around the place or planet with a perfectly secure sense of where he should go, and what he is apt to see.

The eerie and unexpected presence of an alphabet in every living creature might suggest the possibility of a similar argument in biology. It is DNA of course, that acts as life's primordial text, the code itself organized in nucleic triplets, like messages in Morse code. Each triplet is matched to a particular chemical object, an amino acid. There are twenty such acids in all. They correspond to letters in an alphabet. As the code is read somewhere in life's hidden housing, the linear order of the nucleic acids induces a corresponding linear order in the amino acids. The biological finger writes, and what the cell reads is an ordered presentation of such amino acids-a protein.

Like the nucleic acids, proteins are alphabetic objects, composed of discrete constituents. On average, proteins are roughly 250 amino acid residues in length, so a given protein may be imagined as a long biochemical word, one of many.

The aspects of an analogy are now in place. What is needed is a relevant contrast, something comparable to sentences and sequences in language. Of course nothing completely comparable is at hand: there are no sentences in molecular biology. Nonetheless, there is this fact, helpfully recounted by Richard Dawkins: "The actual animals that have ever lived on earth are a tiny subset of the theoretical animals that could exist." It follows that over the course of four billion years, life has expressed itself by means of a particular stock of proteins, a certain set of life-like words.

A combinatorial count is now possible. The MIT physicist Murray Eden, to whom I owe this argument, estimates the number of the viable proteins at 10 to the 50th power. Within this set is the raw material of everything that has ever lived: the flowering plants and the alien insects and the seagoing turtles and the sad shambling dinosaurs, the great evolutionary successes and the great evolutionary failures as well. These creatures are, quite literally, composed of the proteins that over the course of time have performed some useful function, with "usefulness" now standing for the sense of sentencehood in linguistics.

As in the case of language, what has once lived occupies some corner in the space of a larger array of possibilities, the actual residing in the shadow of the possible. The space of all possible proteins of a fixed length (250 residues, recall) is computed by multiplying 20 by itself 250 times (20 to the 250th power). It is idle to carry out the calculation. The numbers larger by far than seconds in the history of the world since the Big Bang or grains of sand on the shores of every sounding sea. Another planet now looms in the night sky, Pluto-sized or bigger, a conceptual companion to the planet containing every sequence composed by endlessly arranging the 26 English letters into sequences 100 letters in length. This planetary doppelganger is the planet of all possible proteins of fixed length, the planet, in a certain sense, of every conceivable form of carbon-based life.

And there the two planets lie, spinning on their soundless axes. The contrast between sentences and sequences on Pluto reappears on Pluto's double as the contrast between useful protein forms and all the rest; and it reappears in terms of the same dramatic difference in numbers, the enormous (20 to the 25th power) overawing the merely big (10 to the 50th power), the contrast between the two being quite literally between an immense and swollen planet and a dime's worth of area. That dime-sized corner, which on Pluto contains the English sentences, on Pluto's double contains the living creatures; and there the biologist may be seen tramping, the warm puddle of wet life achingly distinct amid the planet's snow and stray proteins. It is here that living creatures, whatever their ultimate fate, breathed and moaned and carried on, life evidently having discovered the small quiet corner of the space of possibilities in which things work.

It would seem that evolution, Murray Eden writes in artfully ambiguous language, "was directed toward the incredibly small proportion of useful protein forms. . . ," the word "directed" conveying, at least to me, the sobering image of a stage-managed search, with evolution bypassing the awful immensity of all that frozen space because in some sense evolution knew where it was going.

And yet, from the perspective of Darwinian theory, it is chance that plays the crucial -- that plays the only role in generating the proteins. Wandering the surface of a planet, evolution wanders blindly, having forgotten where it has been, unsure of where it is going.

The Artificer of Design
Random mutations are the great creative demiurge of evolution, throwing up possibilities and bathing life in the bright light of chance. Each living creature is not only what it is but what it might be. What, then, acts to make the possible palpable?

The theory of evolution is a materialistic theory. Various deities need not apply. Any form of mind is out. Yet a force is needed, something adequate to the manifest complexity of the biological world, and something that in the largest arena of all might substitute for the acts of design, anticipation, and memory that are obvious features of such day-to-day activities as fashioning a sentence or a sonnet.

This need is met in evolutionary theory by natural selection, the filter but not the source of change. "It may be said," Darwin wrote,

that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good: silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, as the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

Natural selection emerges from these reflections as a strange force-like concept. It is strange because it is unconnected to any notion of force in physics, and it is force-like because natural selection does something, it has an effect and so unctions as a kind of cause.4

Creatures, habits, organ systems, body plans, organs, and tissues are shaped by natural selection. Population geneticists write of selection forces, selection pressures, and coefficients of natural selection; biologists say that natural selection sculpts, shapes, coordinates, transforms, directs, controls, changes, and transfigures living creatures.

It is natural selection, Richard Dawkins believes, that is the artificer of design, a cunning force that mocks human ingenuity even as it mimics it:

Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventually to organized and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers.

In affirming what Darwin showed, these words suggest that Darwin demonstrated the power of natural selection in some formal sense, settling the issue once and for all. But that is simply not true. When Darwin wrote, the mechanism of evolution that he proposed had only life itself to commend it. But to refer to the power of natural selection by appealing to the course of evolution is a little like confirming a story in the New York Times by reading it twice. The theory of evolution is, after all, a general theory of change; if natural selection can sift the debris of chance to fashion an elephant's trunk, should it not be able to work elsewhere- amid computer programs and algorithms, words and sentences? Skeptics require a demonstration of natural selection's cunning, one that does not involve the very phenomenon it is meant to explain.

No sooner said than done. An extensive literature is now devoted to what is optimistically called artificial life. These are schemes in which a variety of programs generate amusing computer objects and by a process said to be similar to evolution show that they are capable of growth and decay and even a phosphorescent simulacrum of death. An algorithm called "Face Prints," for example, has been designed to enable crime victims to identify their attackers. The algorithm runs through hundreds of facial combinations (long hair, short hair, big nose, wide chin, moles, warts, wens, wrinkles) until the indignant victim spots the resemblance between the long-haired, big-nosed, widechinned portrait of the perpetrator and the perpetrator himself.

It is the presence of the human victim in this scenario that should give pause. What is be doing there, complaining loudly amid those otherwise blind forces? A mechanism that requires a discerning human agent cannot be Darwinian. The Darwinian mechanism neither anticipates nor remembers. It gives no directions and makes no choices. What is unacceptable in evolutionary theory, what is strictly forbidden, is the appearance of a force with the power to survey time, a force that conserves a point or a property because it will be useful. Such a force is no longer Darwinian. How would a blind force know such a thing? And by what means could future usefulness be transmitted to the present?

If life is, as evolutionary biologists so often say, a matter merely of blind thrusting and throbbing, any definition of natural selection must plainly meet what I have elsewhere called a rule against deferred success.5

It is a rule that cannot be violated with impunity; if evolutionary theory is to retain its intellectual integrity, it cannot be violated at all.

But the rule is widely violated, the violations so frequent as to amount to a formal fallacy.

Advent of the Head Monkey
It is Richard Dawkins's grand intention in The Blind Watchmaker to demonstrate, as one reviewer enthusiastically remarked, "how natural selection allows biologists to dispense with such notions as purpose and design." This he does by exhibiting a process in which the random exploration of certain possibilities, a blind stab here, another there, is followed by the filtering effects of natural selection, some of those stabs saved, others discarded. But could a process so conceived -- a Darwinian process -- discover a simple English sentence: a target, say, chosen from Shakespeare? The question is by no means academic. If natural selection cannot discern a simple English sentence, what chance is there that it might have discovered the mammalian eye or the system by which glucose is regulated by the liver? A thought experiment in The Blind Watchmaker now follows. Randomness in the experiment is conveyed by the metaphor of the monkeys, perennial favorites in the theory of probability. There they sit, simian hands curved over the keyboards of a thousand typewriters, their long agile fingers striking keys at random. It is an image of some poignancy, those otherwise intelligent apes banging away at a machine they cannot fathom; and what makes the poignancy pointed is the fact that the system of rewards by which the apes have been induced to strike the typewriter's keys is from the first rigged against them.

The probability that a monkey will strike a given letter is one in 26. The typewriter has 26 keys: the monkey, one working finger. But a letter is not a word. Should Dawkins demand that the monkey get two English letters right, the odds against success rise with terrible inexorability from one in 26 to one in 676. The Shakespearean target chosen by Dawkins -- "Methinks it is like a weasel"-is a six-word sentence containing 28 English letters (including the spaces). It occupies an isolated point in a space of 10,000 million, million, million, million, million, million possibilities. This is a very large number; combinatorial inflation is at work. And these are very long odds. And a six-word sentence consisting of 28 English letters is a very short, very simple English sentence.

Such are the fatal facts. The problem confronting the monkeys is, of course, a double one: they must, to be sure, find the right letters, but they cannot lose the right letters once they have found them. A random search in a space of this size is an exercise in irrelevance. This is something the monkeys appear to know. What more, then, is expected; what more required? Cumulative selection, Dawkins argues- the answer offered as well by Stephen Jay Gould, Manfred Eigen, and Daniel Dennett. The experiment now proceeds in stages. The monkeys type randomly. After a time, they are allowed to survey what they have typed in order to choose the result "which however slightly most resembles the target phrase." It is a computer that in Dawkins's experiment performs the crucial assessments, but I prefer to imagine its role assigned to a scrutinizing monkey-the Head Monkey of the experiment. The process under way is one in which stray successes are spotted and then saved. This process is iterated and iterated again. Variations close to the target are conserved because they are close to the target, the Head Monkey equably surveying the scene until, with the appearance of a miracle in progress, randomly derived sentences do begin to converge on the target sentence itself.

The contrast between schemes and scenarios is striking. Acting on their own, the monkeys are adrift in fathomless possibilities, any accidental success-a pair of English-like letters-lost at once, those successes seeming like faint untraceable lights flickering over a wine-dark sea. The advent of the Head Monkey changes things entirely. Successes are conserved and then conserved again. The light that formerly flickered uncertainly now stays lit, a beacon burning steadily, a point of illumination. By the light of that light, other lights are lit, until the isolated successes converge, bringing order out of nothingness.

The entire exercise is, however, an achievement in self-deception. A target phrase? Iterations that most resemble the target? A Head Monkey that measures the distance between failure and success? If things are sightless, how is the target represented, and how is the distance between randomly generated phrases and the targets assessed? And by whom? And the Head Monkey? What of him? The mechanism of deliberate design, purged by Darwinian theory on the level of the organism, has reappeared in the description of natural selection itself, a vivid example of what Freud meant by the return of the repressed.

This is a point that Dawkins accepts without quite acknowledging, rather like a man adroitly separating his doctor's diagnosis from his own disease.6

Nature presents life with no targets. Life shambles forward, surging here, shuffling there, the small advantages accumulating on their own until something novel appears on the broad evolutionary screen-an arch or an eye, an intricate pattern of behavior, the complexity characteristic of life. May we, then, see this process at work, by seeing it simulated?

"Unfortunately," Dawkins writes, "I think it may be beyond my powers as a programmer to set up such a counterfeit world."7

This is the authentic voice of contemporary Darwinian theory. What may be illustrated by the theory does not involve a Darwinian mechanism; what involves a Darwinian mechanism cannot be illustrated by the theory.

Darwin Without Darwinism
Biologists oftenaffirm that as members of the scientific community they positively welcome criticism. Nonsense. Like everyone else, biologists loathe criticism and arrange their lives so as to avoid it. Criticism has nonetheless seeped into their souls, the process of doubt a curiously Darwinian one in which individual biologists entertain minor reservations about their theory without ever recognizing the degree to which these doubts mount up to a substantial deficit. Creationism, so often the target of their indignation, is the least of their worries.

For many years, biologists have succeeded in keeping skepticism on the circumference of evolutionary thought, where paleontologists, taxonomists, and philosophers linger. But the burning fringe of criticism is now contracting, coming ever closer to the heart of Darwin's doctrine. In a paper of historic importance, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin expressed their dissatisfaction with what they termed "just-so" stories in biology.8

It is by means of a just-so story, for example, that the pop biologist Elaine Morgan explains the presence in human beings of an aquatic diving reflex. An obscure primate ancestral to man, Morgan argues, was actually aquatic, having returned to the sea like the dolphin. Some time later, that primate, having tired of the water, clambered back to land, his aquatic adaptations intact. Just so.

If stories of this sort are intellectually inadequate -- preposterous, in fact -- some biologists are prepared to argue that they are unnecessary as well, another matter entirely. "How seriously," H. Allen Orr asked in a superb if savage review of Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, should we take these endless adaptive explanations of features whose alleged Design may be illusory? Isn't there a difference between those cases where we recognize Design before we understand its precise significance and those cases where we try to make Design manifest concocting a story? And isn't it especially worrisome that we can make up arbitrary traits faster than adaptive stories, and adaptive stories faster than experimental tests?

The camel's lowly hump and the elephant's nose -- these, Orr suggests, may well be adaptive and so designed by natural selection. But beyond the old familiar cases, life may not be designed at all, the weight of evolution borne by neutral mutations, with genes undergoing a slow but pointless drifting in time's soft currents.

Like Orr, many biologists see an acknowledgment of their doubts as a cagey, a calculated, concession; but cagey or not, it is a concession devastating to the larger project of Darwinian biology. Unable to say what evolution has accomplished, biologists now find themselves unable to say whether evolution has accomplished it. This leaves evolutionary theory in the doubly damned position of having compromised the concepts needed to make sense of life -- complexity, adaptation, design - while simultaneously conceding that the theory does little to explain them.

No doubt, the theory of evolution will continue to play the singular role in the life of our secular culture that it has always played. The theory is unique among scientific instruments in being cherished not for what it contains, but for what it lacks. There are in Darwin's scheme no biotic laws, no Bauplan as in German natural philosophy, no special creation, no elan vital, no divine guidance or transcendental forces. The theory functions simply as a description of matter in one of its modes, and living creatures are said to be something that the gods of law indifferently sanction and allow.

"Darwin," Richard Dawkins has remarked with evident gratitude, "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." This is an exaggeration, of course, but one containing a portion of the truth. That Darwin's theory of evolution and biblical accounts of creation play similar roles in the human economy of belief is an irony appreciated by altogether too few biologists.

On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote
I imagine this story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe.

His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that "the Ulysses," mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from "the Quixote."

I raise my eyebrows.

Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer.

"The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden," he says. "They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo."

Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket.

"As you know," he continues, "the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576."

I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed.

"Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor's Los Hombres d'Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza's remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined."

I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. "Is it your understanding, then," I ask, "that every novel in the West was created in this way?"

"Of course," replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: "Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Endnotes
A.S. Romer's Vertebrate Paleontology (University of Chicago Press, third edition, 1966) may be consulted with profit.

The details have been reported in the New York Times and in Science: evidence that at least some entomologists have a good deal of time on their hands.

Schutzenberger's comments were made at a symposium held in 1966. The proceedings were edited by Paul S. Moorhead and Martin Kaplan and published as Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press,1967). Schutzenberger's remarks, together with those of the physicist Murray Eden at the same symposium, constituted the first significant criticism of evolutionary doctrine in recent decades.

Murray Eden is, as usual, perceptive: "It is as if," he writes some pre-Newtonian cosmologist had proposed a theory of planetary motion which supposed that a natural force of unknown origin held the planets in their courses. The supposition is right enough and the idea of a force between two celestial bodies is a very useful one, but it is hardly a theory."

Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck (1986).

The same pattern of intellectual displacement is especially vivid in Daniel Dennett's description of natural selection as a force subordinate to what he calls "the principle of the accumulation of design." Sifting through the debris of chance, natural selection, he writes, occupies itself by "thriftily conserving the design work . . . accomplished at each stage." But there is no such principle. Dennett has simply assumed that a sequence of conserved advantages will converge to an improvement in design; the assumption expresses a non sequitur.

It is absurdly easy to set up a sentence-searching algorithm obeying purely Darwinian constraints. The result, however, is always the same -- gibberish.

"The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," Proceedings of the Royal Society. Volume B 205 (1979).

David Berlinski, who has taught mathematics and philosophy in American and French universities, is the author, most recently, of A Tour of the Calculus (Pantheon) and of The Body Shop, a novel forthcoming from St. Martin's). His article, "The Soul of Man Under Physics," appeared in our January issue.

Copyright © 1997 David Berlinski. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
File Date: 2.04.00

Posted by: Eustace P McGargle | July 20, 2009 1:56 AM

Keeping an Eye on Evolution: Richard Dawkins, a relentless Darwinian spear carrier, trips over Mount Improbable.
Review of Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins (W. H. Norton & Company, Inc. 1996)

By: David Berlinski
The Globe & Mail
November 2, 1996

The theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought. It is large, almost entirely useless, and the object of superstitious awe. Richard Dawkins is widely known as the theory's uncompromising champion. Having made his case in The Blind Watchmaker and River out of Eden, Dawkins proposes to make it yet again in Climbing Mount Improbable. He is not a man given to tiring himself by repetition.

Darwin's theory has a double aspect. The first is the doctrine of descent with modification; the second, the doctrine of random variation and natural selection. Descent with modification provides the pattern; random variation and natural selection, the mechanism. Dawkins' concern is with the mechanism; the pattern he takes for granted.

Biological structures such as the mammalian eye are complex in the sense that they contain many parts arranged in specific ways. It is unlikely that such structures could have been discovered by chance. No one, the astrophysicist N. C. Wickramasinghe once observed with some asperity, expects a tornado touching on a junkyard to produce a Boeing 747. This may suggest--it has suggested to some physicists--a disturbing gap between what life has accomplished and what the theory of evolution can explain. The suggestion provokes Dawkins to indignation. "It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious," he writes, mixing three metaphors joyously, that the discovery by chance of a complex object is improbable; but the Darwinian mechanism, he adds, "acts by breaking the improbability up into small manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes...."

This is a fine image, one introduced originally by the American bio-mathematician Sewell Wright. Random variation offers the mountaineer an allowance of small changes. Chance is at work. Natural selection freezes the successful changes in place. And this process owes nothing to chance. In time, the successful changes form a connected path, a staircase to complexity.

The example that Dawkins pursues in greatest detail is the eye. Darwin himself wondered at its complexity, remarking in a letter to an American colleague that "the eye...gives me a cold shudder." That shudder notwithstanding, Darwin resolved his doubts in his own favor; the eye, he concluded, was created by a single-step series of improvements, what he called 'fine gradations.' Where Darwin went, Dawkins follows.

It is one thing, however, to appeal to a path up Mount Improbable, quite another to demonstrate its existence. Dawkins has persuaded himself that because such a path might exist, further argument is unnecessary. Impediments are simply directed to disappear: "There is no difficulty"; "there is a definite tendency in the right direction"; "It is easy to see that..."; "it is not at all difficult to imagine...."

In fact, the difficulties are very considerable. A single retinal cell of the human eye consists of a nucleus, a mitochondrial rod, and a rectangular array containing discrete layers of photon-trapping pigment. The evolutionary development of the eye evidently required an increase in such layers. An inferential staircase being required, the thing virtually constructs itself, Dawkins believes, one layer at a time. "The point," he writes, "is that ninety-one membranes are more effective...than ninety, ninety are more effective that eighty-nine, and so on back to one membrane, which is more effective than zero."

This is a plausible scheme only because Dawkins has considered a single feature of the eye in isolation. The parts of a complex artifact or object typically gain their usefulness as an ensemble. A Dixie Cup consists of a tube joined to a disk. Without the disk, the cup does not hold less water than it might; it cannot hold water at all. And ditto for the tube, the two items, disk and tube, forming an irreducibly complex system.

What holds for the Dixie Cup holds for the eye as well. Light strikes the eye in the form of photons, but the optic nerve conveys electrical impulses to the brain. Acting as a sophisticated transducer, the eye must mediate between two different physical signals. The retinal cells that figure in Dawkins' account are connected to horizontal cells; these shuttle information laterally between photoreceptors in order to smooth the visual signal. Amacrine cells act to filter the signal. Bipolar cells convey visual information further to ganglion cells, which in turn conduct information to the optic nerve. The system gives every indication of being tightly integrated, its parts mutually dependent.

The very problem that Darwin's theory was designed to evade now reappears. Like vibrations passing through a spider's web, changes to any part of the eye, if they are to improve vision, must bring about changes throughout the optical system. Without a correlative increase in the size and complexity of the optic nerve, an increase in the number of photoreceptive membranes can have no effect. A change in the optic nerve must in turn induce corresponding neurological changes in the brain. If these changes come about simultaneously, it makes no sense to talk of a gradual ascent of Mount Improbable. If they do not come about simultaneously, it is not clear why they should come about at all.

The same problem reappears at the level of biochemistry. Dawkins has framed his discussion in terms of gross anatomy. Each anatomical change that he describes requires a number of coordinate biochemical steps. "[T]he anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple," the biochemist Mike Behe remarks in a provocative new book (Darwin's Black Box), "actually involve staggeringly complicated biochemical processes." A number of separate biochemical events are required simply to begin the process of curving a layer of proteins to form a lens. What initiates the sequence? How is it coordinated? And how controlled? On these absolutely fundamental matters, Dawkins has nothing whatsoever to say.

In addition to the eye, Dawkins discusses spiders and their webs, the origin of flight, and the nature of seashells. The natural history is charming.

Dawkins is a capable if somewhat dry prose stylist, although such expressions as 'designoid' and 'wince-makingly' are themselves wince-making. The science throughout is primitive. Difficulties are resolved by sleight-of-hand. "In real life," Dawkins remarks in a representative passage, "there may be formidable complications of detail." Yes? What of them, those formidable complications? "These emerge simply and without fuss."

Is the elephant's large nose truly the result of an evolutionary progression? Then some demonstration is required showing that intermediate-sized noses are valuable as well. None is forthcoming. "If a medium sized trunk were always less efficient," Dawkins writes, "than either a small nose or a big trunk, the big trunk would never have evolved." Indeed. The emergence of powered flight is treated as an engaging fable, one in which either arboreal animals glided downward from the tree tops or a primitive dinosaur hopped upward toward the sky. "The beauty of this theory," Dawkins affirms, commending the hopping scenario, "is that the same nervous circuits that were used to control the center of gravity in the jumping ancestor would, rather effortlessly, have lent themselves to controlling the flight surfaces later in the evolutionary story." It is the phrase "rather effortlessly" that gives to this preposterous assertion its antic charm.

A final note. In a book whose examples are chosen from natural history, it is important to get the details right. Hawks may soar or sail, but they cannot hover like helicopters. Not all organisms share precisely the same genetic code. And Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Big Blue, and not a program entitled Genius 2.

Related Reading

Darwin's Black Box by Mike Behe (The Free Press, 1996)

Full House, by Stephen Jay Gould (Harmony Books, 1996)

Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett (Simon & Shuster, 1995)

Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton (Adler & Adler, 1986)

Reinventing Darwin by Niles Eldredge (John Wiley & Sons, 1995)

Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic and Luck by David Berlinski (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986).

The Globe & Mail is published in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Visit GlobeNet at: http://www.TheGlobeAndMail.com

Posted by: Owlmirror | July 20, 2009 2:09 AM

Bah. That should have been: David Berlinski !!

I would apologize to David Berlinkski (whoever that might be), except that the top hits for "David Berlinkski" are obviously tyops for David Berlinski, who deserves all the contempt that he gets.

Posted by: Feynmaniac | July 20, 2009 2:11 AM

Copy and paster,

No point in continuing. You are going to get banned and your comments copy-and-paste articles will be deleted. So stop doing it YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE.

Posted by: Julius Marx | July 20, 2009 2:20 AM

The Hidden Face Of God " How Science Reveals The Ultimate Truth " Backgrounder

Last December the news was made public that Prof Antony Flew, the world's most famous philosopher of atheism, had become a believer that there is a supernatural or spiritual force active in this magnificent world of ours. The reaction in the world press was monumental. It ranged from "what a courageous person to be willing to change opinion in the light of the facts", to "he's been duped by Schroeder." Prof Flew said that the main driving force for his dramatic change in belief was the information he read in my 3rd book, 'The Hidden Face Of God', and in a book written by Roy Varghese, 'The Wonder of the World'.

* Here is the News Report *

World's Most Famous Atheist Accepts Existence of God, Cites Modern Science!
The best-known atheist of the last 50 years, Professor Antony Flew, made the announcement in a symposium on science and religion, that the discoveries of modern science have led him to accept the existence of God. Flew was joined in the symposium by leading Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder and noted Scottish thinker John Haldane. Last December the news was made public that Prof Antony Flew, the world's most famous philosopher of atheism, had become a believer that there is a supernatural or spiritual force active in this magnificent world of ours. The reaction in the world press was monumental. It ranged from "what a courageous person to be willing to change opinion in the light of the facts", to "he's been duped by Schroeder."

Excerpt - Prologue: We are the universe come alive

A single consciousness, a universal wisdom, pervades the universe. And more than that. The discoveries of science, those that search the quantum nature of subatomic matter, have moved us to the brink of a startling realization: all existence is the expression of this wisdom. In the laboratories we experience it as information that first physically articulated as energy and then condensed into the form of matter. Every particle, every being, from atom to human, appears to represent a level of information, of wisdom. The puzzle we will confront in this book as we study the behavior of the atomic building blocks of all matter and then the functioning of biological cells is from where does this information arise? There is no hint of it in the laws of nature that govern the interactions among the basic particles that comprise all matter. It just appears as a given, with no causal agent evident, as if it is an intrinsic facet of nature.

The concept that there might be an attribute as non-physical as information or wisdom at the heart of existence in no way denigrates the physical aspects of our lives. Denial of the pleasures and wonder of our bodies is a sad misreading of the nature of existence. The accomplishments of a science based on materialism have given us physical comforts, invented life-saving medicines, sent people to the moon. The oft-quoted statement, "not by bread alone does a human live" (Deuteronomy 8:3), lets us know that there are two crucial aspects to our lives, one of which is bread, physical satisfaction. The other parameter is an underlying universal wisdom. There's no competition here between a metaphysical spirituality and the material. The two are complementary, as in the concept 'to complete.'

When we see through the camouflage haze that at times convinces us that only the material exists and we touch that consciousness, we know it. A joyful rush of emotion sweeps over the entire self. It's telling us that we've come home. We've discovered the essence of being. Everyone has felt it at some time or other. Perhaps at a brilliant sunrise, in a work of art, the words of a lover. The physical and the metaphysical join.

If we dared, we'd call the experience spiritual, even Godly. But there's a reluctance to use the "G" word. "Listen to the Force" is acceptable on the great silver screen. Had Star Wars said "Listen to God," the theater would have emptied in a flash. The reluctance is not surprising considering the bizarre claims erroneously attributed to God through the ages and especially in our age. Fortunately, most of those claims are based on the expectations for the putative God of the Bible that we learned as children. Obviously, when our child-level wisdom is evaluated by our adult minds, that wisdom is bound to seem naive. For many, it comes as a surprise that there is far more sophistication to the metaphysical than that which we learned as youngsters.

The age-old theological view of the universe is that all existence is the manifestation of a transcendent wisdom, with a universal consciousness being its manifestation. If I substitute the word information for wisdom, theology begins to sound like quantum physics. We may be witnessing the scientific confluence of the physical with the spiritual. …

We are, each of us, a part the universe seeking itself. We struggle between a world that seems totally material and the emotional, even spiritual, pull we all feel at times. To relegate, a priori, those feelings of love and joy and spirituality to some assumed function of our ancestors' evolutionary drive for survival masks the greatest pleasures in life, the experiential realization of the metaphysical.

In the following pages, as we journey through the newly discovered marvels of the cosmos, of life and finally of the brain/mind interface, I ask only that, as you read, you use these facts to re-examine your opinions concerning the origins of this wonderful world in which we live.

Excerpt - Biology And The Information Of Life: An Overview

The opening of the 20th century marked the era of physics. Theory and discovery revealed a reality at both sub-atomic and cosmic dimensions undreamed of just a few decades earlier. Einstein and relativity, Planck and quantum physics, Heisenberg and uncertainty exposed the wisdom within which all existence is embedded.

By the 1950's, especially with the demonstration by Crick, Watson and Wilkins of the double helix structure of the genetic codes present in all life, the biological sciences moved to the fore. Almost simultaneously, cybernetics – computer based information processing – entered the scene and together with molecular biology, the world entered the era of information. For indeed information lies at the base of both molecular biology and computer science; the former manifesting a perplexing depth and breadth of information; the former and the latter both manifesting phenomenal abilities to manipulate information.

In the coming chapters we'll take a journey through the wisdom that lies within the cells of life. If we did not observe the processes we'll see within those cells and merely proposed them as a theory, the theory would be rejected as fantasy. The processes of life are not merely complex. To call the phenomenon of life complex trivializes the reality.

Our study will not be easy. As I discuss the details, some parts will even be tedious. But the wonder of life lies in the details. We'll discern a unifying wisdom embedded in even the simplest forms of life that outshines the wonder of the physics from which it arises. We'll discover that the essence of life, of all life, is the storage, organization and processing of information. Information, the expression of wisdom, lies at the heart of life. One can only wonder how and from where this phenomenon of a complex order arose. It is in no way evident either in the atoms and molecules from which that life is composed or in the laws of nature that govern the bio-chemical interactions among those atoms.

I have no hidden agenda in this tour of the intricacies of life, no attempt to deny that life developed from the simple to the complex. In my opinion, such a goal would be absurd. Paleontology, biology, and the Bible too, all present the account of life's flow. The Bible devotes a mere six sentences to the process. Paleontology records the past in thousands and perhaps millions of fossils. Biology texts on the subject fill libraries. My objectives in the following discussion are: 1) To enable a knowledge-based evaluation of what processes might have been responsible for life's development in the light of the overwhelming complexity present in all forms of life; and, 2) to discern that the ordered, information-containing complexity found in life is of a type qualitatively different from that found in the sub-structures from which it arose.

This second aspect is in itself surprising. Systems can give rise to secondary systems that are more complex, but that complexity is a fractal extension, an increase in amount but not in type, of the original system's complexity. With life, the increase in complexity seems to be one of a new type as well as amount.

So puzzling is the intricacy of the biochemistry that powers life that at times it seems as if wisdom must be an inherent characteristic of the universe waiting to be expressed in various forms. It would be as if a metaphysical substrate was impressed upon the physical. It may come as a surprise that the Bible suggests this to be true.

Before dismissing such a suggestion as rubbish, or accepting it as the absolute and obvious truth, let's look at the text. Much of our understanding of the Bible has to do with our brain and how it learns. If we take a sparrow away from its mother before it hatches and never let it hear tweedle de, tweedle dum, but only play in the back ground some other tune, it will never be able to learn to chirp out tweedle de tweedle dum. The song a sparrow learns in its youth is its song for life. Humans are not so very different. When a statement is repeated over and over it takes on an aspect of truth, whether true or not. And if in our youth, be it biological youth or cultural youth, we had that fact impressed upon our thoughts, that's our "truth" for life. The translation of the opening sentence of the Bible has fallen under that spell.

Genesis 1:1 is usually read in the English, is "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Unfortunately, that rendition, which the entire English speaking world has heard repeatedly from youth (both biological and cultural youth), misses the meaning of the Hebrew. The miss is not very surprising. The English version stems from the King James Bible, first published in 1611. But the King James Bible is a translation preceded by the Latin Vulgate attributed to St. Jerome in the 4th century and that Latin version is taken from the Greek Septuagint that dates back some 2200 years. The Septuagint is taken from the Hebrew. "In the beginning" is three translations downstream from the original.

The opening word, usually translated as "In the beginning," is the Hebrew Be'reasheet. Be'reasheet can mean "In the beginning of" but not "In the beginning." The difficulty with the preposition "of" is that its object is absent from the sentence and so the usual English translation merely drops it. Rather than changing the meaning of the Hebrew and ignoring the "of," the 2,100 year old Jerusalem translation of Genesis into Aramaic realizes that Be'reacheet is a compound word: the prefix Be' – with; and raesheet – a first wisdom. The meaning becomes: "With wisdom God created the heavens and the earth." That wisdom is the first part of creation finds its parallel repeatedly in the Bible. For example, "With the word of God the heavens were formed" (Ps. 33:6). And, "How manifold are Your works, Eternal, You made them all with wisdom" (Ps 104:24). And, "Raesheet hohmah - Beginning of wisdom," (Ps. 111:10). Wisdom is the fundamental building block of the universe, and as such it is an inherent characteristic. In the processes of life that wisdom finds its most complex revelation. Wisdom, information, an idea, is the link between the metaphysical creating Force and the physical creation. It is the hidden face of God.

"Schroeder takes the widespread perception that science disproves religion and turns it on its head: from cosmology to neurology the latest research makes sense only if viewed from a metaphysical perspective. The strict materialism that excludes all purpose, choice and spirituality from the world simply cannot account for the data pour in in from labs and observatories. Nor can it explain the thrill of transcendence that occasionally pierces ordinary lives. Well schooled in the rigors of sciences, Schroeder knows too much about natural complexity to try to wring some tidy set of doctrines out of the cosmos. Rather, it is in an ineffable shiver of the divine, a deep-down stirring of winder that he discovers in the furthest reaches of quantum physics, glossed with the poetry of the Hebrew prophets and the mysteries of the kabbalah. At the heart of the cell, in the depths of the quasar, lies a deep wisdom encoded in a unified chain of information. Let rigid atheists and biblical literalists take a pass, but this book deserves widespread circulation among readers still alive to the hidden harmonies of the universe."
Bryce Christensen

From the Publisher

Gerald Schroeder, an MIT-trained scientist who has worked in both physics and biology, has emerged in recent years as one of the most popular and accessible apostles for the melding of science and religion. He first reconciled science and faith as different perspectives on a single whole in The Science of God. Now, in The Hidden Face of God, Schroeder takes a bold step forward, to show that science, properly understood, provides positive reasons for faith. Recent research in biology, chemistry, physics, and neuroscience contains unmistakable hints about the ultimate nature of reality. Simply put, we now know not only that behind matter lies energy, but also that behind energy lies wisdom. Scientists have touched on this wisdom in the laboratory, and its implications are awesome. From the wisdom encoded in DNA and analyzed by information science, to the wisdom unveiled in the fantastic complexity of cellular life, to the wisdom inherent in human consciousness, The Hidden Face of God offers a tour of the best of modern science. Schroeder makes no attempt to "prove" the existence of God. Yet his interpretations of the work of his fellow scientists touch on life's ultimate mysteries. His wise observations on the organization of organic life, on the power of humans to make sense of their sensory inputs, and on the complexities of the code of DNA all show that life has a direction and purpose that cannot be explained in purely physical terms. Throughout, he addresses three great themes: the question of first causes (i.e., where do the laws of nature come from?); the inseparability of mind and matter; and the philosophical problem of design. To believe that a designer must have been involved, he reminds us, we need not insist on perfection or on our view of perfection in the design. The Hidden Face of God will open a world of science to religious believers, and it will cause skeptics to rethink some of their deepest beliefs.

Persons interested in acquiring a copy, please order through here:
http://www.sciencefindsgod.com/ or contact Dr. Schroeder at his email address: gs@geraldschroeder.com

Posted by: Owlmirror | July 20, 2009 2:57 AM

Schroeder makes no attempt to "prove" the existence of God.

Of course not. He has no evidence; merely empty if imaginative conjecture. Or in other words, speculative fiction.

Posted by: Britomart | July 20, 2009 6:43 AM

Does he think there is a prize for the longest bit of irrelevant cut and paste he can find to plop here?

Does he think all this constitutes evidence?

Hey Smoggy, we found a friend for you !!

Posted by: Kel, OM | July 21, 2009 2:46 AM

I think I just realised who that was - a South African creationist by the name of Johan. That dude can't help but copy / paste.

No-one will get anything from arguing with this guy except a sense of frustration and futility.

Posted by: DJM | July 22, 2009 5:33 PM

For what it's worth, there seems to be a little bit of a challenge issued from a fellow at the discovery institute, perhaps directed towards scientists, to challenge them on Meyer's new book. But the DI or this senior fellow doesn't seem too eager to follow through with the challenge. It can be found at the blog site:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/kingdomofpriests/2009/07/a-challenge-to-intelligent-design-bashing-regulars-on-this-blog.htm

I'm not very active on the blogs, so those who have more access may want to start spreading this around.

Maybe it's time to call the DI's bluff and force them to step up.