‘Methinks HE is like a weasel’ (or is it a beaver?)
Note to the general reader: If it seems I’m overly hard on Professor Dawkins, recall that he has labeled those who do not share his views on evolution as ‘either stupid, ignorant, dishonest, or… evil.’ Since I do not agree with him, I have taken his statement personally.
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One way to differentiate a useful idiot — the most extreme examples best described as ‘True Believers’ — from an active participator in deceit is via the degree of outright deception (lying) on the part of the individual in question — useful idiots (and especially True Believers) will likewise lie, but not to the same extent.
With you, Professor Dawkins, I was at first convinced that you are of the former category, but the following example of deceit from The Blind Watchmaker is so egregious, and so persistent over the years (given that the book was published in 1986, which gave you plenty of time to correct the ‘mistake,’ if it was such) that it’s obvious you are an active part of the deceit in the neo-Darwinist agenda (see the Huxley quote at the end of my last post).
Although you cannot not know what you’ve done with the ‘weasel’ deception I’ll herein repeat it, for the record:
In The Blind Watchmaker you compare the amino acid sequence of a protein (such as haemoglobin [the formation of the eye would do just as well]) with a sequence of letters in a phrase: you select the line from Hamlet ‘METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL’ (28 characters, including spaces) and aim to find this by random typing via a computer program. Of course, it is practically impossible that the whole phrase would ever be typed at random (in one go). In ‘real life’ evolution, your computer program is meant to represent the gradual formation of the eye by random mutation/natural selection.
You envisage that a random sequence of 28 characters (the number of characters including spaces in the phrase) is typed and there is some way of recognizing whether any of the letters are correct, and if so, fixing them so that they do not change. The sequence is then selectively copied again (and again and again, etc) – keeping the right letters fixed, but at each of the remaining places another character is selected at random. If any of these are ’right’ then these too are recognized and fixed, and the selective copying continues. Not surprisingly, with this sort of process it does not take many rounds of selective copying (generally a few 10s) to end up with the right sequence.
As a general illustration of how cumulative selection might work if one assumes evolution has foresight it is acceptable. But since you (and Darwin) have ruled out foresight — meaning a ‘target’ — what you have done is indicate design (in the formation of the eye, in this case). Insofar as you differentiate ‘single-step’ evolution from ‘cumulative evolution’ you have proved that the eye could not have formed via the former, via your own calculations, which come at the end of your explanation (which I’ve put in bold):
By repeating the procedure, a randomly generated sequence of 28 letters and spaces will be gradually changed each generation. The sequences progress through each generation:
Generation 01: WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P [2]
Generation 02: WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P
Generation 10: MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P
Generation 20: MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL
Generation 30: METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL
Generation 40: METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL
Generation 43: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
Dawkins continues:
The exact time taken by the computer to reach the target doesn’t matter. If you want to know, it completed the whole exercise for me, the first time, while I was out to lunch. It took about half an hour. (Computer enthusiasts may think this unduly slow. The reason is that the program was written in BASIC, a sort of computer baby-talk. When I rewrote it in Pascal, it took 11 seconds.) Computers are a bit faster at this kind of thing than monkeys, but the difference really isn’t significant. What matters is the difference between the time taken by cumulative selection, and the time which the same computer, working flat out at the same rate, would take to reach the target phrase if it were forced to use the other procedure of single-step selection:about a million million million million million years. This is more than a million million million times as long as the universe has so far existed. (my emphasis)
Your computer program, while supposedly demonstrating ‘cumulative selection,’ actually defines ‘One step’ selection, which you readily admit cannot, in a statistical sense (see the above odds), account for the eye, or any macro change in organ formation (or body type).
Professor Dawkins, as you have to know by now — since what I am saying here has been reiterated multiple times since the book’s publication — what you have ‘proved’ is the polar opposite of what you claim. You have, in effect, showed design in action.
For your model to work, and as you have repeated many times, albeit in other contexts, there can be no ‘target’ in the process of Darwinian evolution. Yet here you are, brazenly defining a target, presumably hoping your readers will not notice the deceitful 180 turnaround.
For those readers who can’t (or won’t ) accept that Dawkins would so blatantly deceive his reader, he himself admits his offense, although he waits long enough (in the text) so the reader likely will not realize he has done so:
Although the monkey/Shakespeare model is useful for explaining (1) the distinction between single-step selection and cumulative selection, it is misleading in important ways. One of these is that, in each generation of selective ‘breeding’, the mutant ‘progeny’ phrases were judged according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. (2) Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. (3) There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success. [my emphases]
‘Alas, poor Erectus, I knew him, Horatio’.
Nice try, Professor Dawkins. Not only did you delay the above admissions until your reader had accepted your deceit, but you buried your admission in needless and misdirecting babbling. I’ve numbered the points of importance; the un-emphasized texts are for misdirection only.
In number one (1), you own up to the crucial difference between single-step selection and cumulative selection, the former creating impossible odds of success and the latter showing how such odds could be circumvented. Here, right here, we have the absolute crux of the matter of why Darwinian evolution is impossible. If it is indeed single-step selection that your process of macro-evolution relies upon, we have a QED for debunking it. And even a moderately careful analysis of your passage reveals your admission that this is so.
Number two (2) is truly a beaut of a repetition of this point. ‘Life isn’t like that.’ Indeed, and neither is evolution. Not much to add to that…
Number three (3) merely repeats the point that to aim at ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’ is the metaphorical Big No-No in your Master’s theory of The Origin of Species, i.e., aiming at a target, or foresight.
It bears repeating; The rest of the text is meant to distract the reader from your having admitted to blatantly lying. I especially like the bit about ‘human vanity’ cherishing absurd notions. Get those heads nodding, eh, Professor? NLP in action.
Do you think it’s okay to lie if sometime later you say, ‘Oh, by the way, in that vital passage about how evolution works, I lied’?
For Irony Fans
Being a fan of irony myself, I’ll quote the following from an edition of Evolution News, wherein a researcher digs even deeper into Dawkins’s hypocrisy, unearthing a spectacular irony. The writer’s name is, appropriately (given the implicit humor), Jonathan Witt.
Something Else Is Rotten in the State of Dawkins’s Weasel Argument
There’s another serious problem with Dawkins’s weasel argument, one that has everything to do with his overdeveloped love of reductionism. Dawkins, the same reductionist who refers to humans as DNA “survival machines,” takes a similarly reductive approach to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, causing him to miss a delicious irony.
To see what I’m talking about, we need a bit more context. Ben Wiker and I spend several pages on this in our book A Meaningful World. What follows is a briefer explanation.
The weasel line comes in Act 3, Scene 2 of the play, in a conversation between Prince Hamlet and Polonius, the king’s chief adviser:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.
Before quoting that passage, Dawkins has fun at the expense of all those benighted religious folks who believe in things like an intelligent designer, though he is shrewd enough to come at the whole thing sideways.
“Sometimes clouds, through the random kneading and carving of the winds, come to look like familiar objects,” he writes. “There is a much published photograph taken by the pilot of a small aeroplane of what looks a bit like the face of Jesus, staring out of the sky. We have all seen clouds that reminded us of something.”
Translation — Hint, hint: Seeing the handiwork of God in nature is almost as silly as imagining that a cloud that resembles Jesus was actually designed to look like Jesus.
Dawkins then introduces the Hamlet/Polonius passage, saying the two men are just commenting on the curious, passing resemblances. But the mention of the Jesus cloud, and the wider context in The Blind Watchmaker, aimed at debunking those religious folks who see design in nature where none exists, suggests the unstated purpose of his selecting this particular scene out of all the scenes and lines written by Shakespeare. That is, seeing design in nature is as misguided as seeing design in the interesting shape of a cloud.
The irony is that, understood in its context, the Hamlet passage is better suited to illustrate exactly the opposite: that is, the tendency of some people to mistake an intelligent cause for a purely natural one. To see this, we need more context than Dawkins provides.
A Death Intelligently Designed
At the beginning of the play we learn that King Hamlet has recently died and that the king’s brother, Claudius, has managed to seize the throne before young Prince Hamlet could return home from university. Claudius also married the widowed queen, Hamlet’s mom, within a couple of months of the funeral. Hamlet doesn’t think much of his uncle Claudius, and he’s depressed about his father’s death and his mother’s speedy remarriage.
Murder as death ‘by design.’
Prince Hamlet, though, doesn’t know the half of it at this early stage of the play. He eventually discovers that Claudius poisoned King Hamlet in order to usurp the throne and take the man’s wife. King Hamlet, in other words, didn’t simply die of old age. He was murdered.
What did old King Hamlet’s chief adviser, Polonius, do in all this? While he fancies himself a man of penetrating insight, Polonius remains oblivious of any wrongdoing and quickly aligns himself with the new King Claudius. Polonius also orders his beautiful daughter, Ophelia, to keep away from Prince Hamlet, assuming Hamlet is just toying with her affections and has no intention of marrying so far beneath him.
So Hamlet dislikes Polonius on two grounds: Polonius has cut Hamlet off from the woman he loves, and Polonius is a clueless court toady who imagines he’s wise and courageous.
In the scene quoted above, the two men actually are only pretending to think the clouds look like particular animals. Some cinematic versions emphasize this by staging the scene inside the palace so that the men aren’t even gazing at actual clouds. So what’s going on?
Hamlet is acting nuts, acting as if he is “seeing things.” But there is method to his madness. He’s using the cover of madness to poke fun at Polonius for being such a clueless yes-man. First, Hamlet gets Polonius to agree that the “cloud” looks like a camel, then a weasel, then a whale. Hamlet is revealing that the sycophantic Polonius will agree to almost anything a royal tells him.
Methinks Dawkins has his imagery ass-backwards…
Put yourself in Hamlet’s place. He desperately needs Polonius’s help in proving King Claudius’s guilt, but Polonius is too busy toadying up to the new king to harbor any suspicions of the man. Polonius sees what he wants to see and ignores what is convenient for him to ignore.
The whole scene and the wider tension between the two men, in other words, actually involves Polonius’s refusal to see intelligent design where it actually exists — namely, in the designed death, the murder, of old King Hamlet. Polonius attributes the old king’s death to purely blind, material causes when in fact the king’s death was intelligently designed — that is, foul play.
Richard Dawkins Is Polonius
One parallel to the origins science debate, then, is that Richard Dawkins is a modern day Polonius: He ignores the evidence of intelligent design that should be abundantly clear to him.
And the moral, if we’re willing to draw a line so far afield from the original play to our present context: Don’t be Richard Dawkins. Don’t mistake an intelligent cause for a natural one. Don’t miss the wider context: the evidence that not only living cells but our living planet, our solar system, and the laws and constants of physics and chemistry are all finely tuned to allow for living things such as camels and weasels and whales — and, to marvel at it all, scientists and poets alike. [End quote]
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Well done, Jonathan Witt! I should mention, however, that I do not agree completely with the Discovery Institute’s take or presentation of their Intelligent Design argument. Although there will be more on this in an upcoming post, suffice to say that they should have limited themselves to proving Darwin (and Dawkins and neo-Darwinism) wrong and let those who want to believe in an Intelligent Designer (God or whatever) do so ‘on their own time.’ For me — and possibly for logic’s sake — debunking random mutation/natural selection as driver of evolution — which they have done spectacularly well — does not ipso facto prove an active designer, or Designer. This problem has opened I.D. to the relentless (if dishonest) criticism it has had to endure.
As I say, hang in for more to come on this.
Still Another Irony (back to my ‘Open Letter’)
First a quote from your book The Extended Phenotype:
‘The key point is that the EP embraces constructions, such as the dams built by beavers, whose quality is correlated with variations, or alleles, in certain of the organism’s genes, so that natural selection can act upon them. A new allele that leads to better dam constructions will in turn benefit the beaver expressing it.’
Putting a beaver on the cover, given that beaver behavior debunks your theory… Irony? Methinks so.
You make much of dam building, specifically using (in the above quote) as an example a random variation that causes the beaver to hold his head higher (than before) while carrying (by swimming) a tree branch toward the dam (or house) in progress, since this would prevent the mud from washing off the wood, which in turn makes the structure more solid.
That this tiny advantage would be pointed out when, as we will see, the whole dam-building enterprise would never get started to begin with, demonstrates your inability to consider how the process would actually work. Call this a minor irony, with the biggie to come.
Professor Dawkins, I’ll now provide a quote I’m sure you will agree with, given it’s all but a paraphrase from The Extended Phenotype. The words are via Dr. Jerry Coyne’s website and concern your favorite example of an extended phenotype — a term referring to a behavior that is genetically imprinted (here, in beavers), in the same sense that, say, a beaver’s tail has been imprinted to improve swimming proficiency:
A beaver dam is probably the most famous example of an extended phenotype in nature, though on the sexual side one could mention the bowerbird’s bowers. Here’s a video of beavers working on their ‘lodge’ or home, which is situated in the middle of the lake created by the dam.
Yes, you neo-Darwinists are truly enamored by beaver dam building, but let’s do what you have obviously never done, Professor Dawkins and look at the step-by-step process of beaver dam-building, and see if it fits this quote from your Master:
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed [or extended phenotype like beaver dam-building], which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications [all of which must have selective advantage], my theory would absolutely break down.”
There can be no doubt that beaver dam building plus the subsequent construction of the animals’ ‘house’ in the middle of the dam-created pond (or full-blown lake) is of great ‘selective’ value.
Your problem (as a neo-Darwinian) is reflected in the amount of time and degree of effort it takes to construct the dam and then the house, keeping in mind that every step must be of selective advantage – recall that random mutation/natural selection has no foresight, i.e., the process doesn’t know that a dam/house will be the final result of the many steps necessary in the construction.
‘What are you doing, dear?’ ‘I dunno. Just shaddap!’
What should already be obvious is that is there not one step – not one – that is of selective advantage, but quite the reverse: Each step will not only expend energy with no up-side, but, given the noise and all-around commotion caused by a construction project of such staggering environmental transformation, will attract predators.
In fact, let’s do what (again) you neo-Darwinists rarely do, and imagine the step-by-step process:
Step one: Cutting down of trees to be used for construction materials. Worthy of note here is the fact that the beaver’s diet is tree bark, not the pith, so the act of felling the tree could only amount to a minuscule amount of nourishment ingested (as the beaver cuts through the bark to get to the interior pith), with a large amount of energy expended.
Or assuming that the beaver drags deadfalls (trees already down) toward the stream to be dammed, we must ask ourselves ‘why’ in the sense of ‘survival of the fittest’ is the beaver doing that? Beavers eat only fresh, living tree bark, so we must ask what sort of ‘random mutation’ could have ‘motivated’ the beaver to do this?
Addendum: I can’t help do what you so obviously did in the video from my last post and do a bit of anthropomorphizing. Imagine a beaver couple, hubby and wifey, and hubby has been at his dam building project for some weeks now, dragging trees around the forest and piling them up by a creek, with wifey looking on in distress, then finally blurting, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Hubby pauses momentarily in his frenzied work, looks around, and replies, ‘I have no idea, but I just have to do it.’
(The scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind also comes to mind, as the Richard Dreyfuss character obsessively builds a miniature Devil’s Tower in his living room.)
A different edition, but with the same irony-laden beaver.
And by what bizarre practice of ‘trial and error’ would ‘teach’ the beaver the engineering know-how, once he has dragged freshly cut trees or deadfalls to the stream? Professor, you must explain how dam-building behavior (cutting the trees, dragging them and so forth and so on) – before and after this trial and error – results (by some percentage) in this beaver surviving and reproducing more efficiently than another, non-dam-obsessed, beaver. If you cannot do this, then the ‘my theory would absolutely break down’ observation of Charles Darwin inevitably kicks in.
In a final and (aesthetically perfect) irony, you, Professor Dawkins, actually put a beaver on the cover of The Extended Phenotype, apparently ignorant of the fact that the animal’s dam-building behavior does exactly the opposite of what you claim.
Yours truly,
Allan Weisbecker
Yes, I’ve had enough of Richard Dawkins, although I could go on and on and…
Ever heard of ‘Biocentrism”? How consciousness creates the universe… My understanding is that it’s not by chance we live on a planet in a “goldilocks zone”, it’s unavoidable. No need for God & of course the design is “intelligent”, the universe is from & for life firstmost, thus evolution has a ‘goal’ in the sense of overcoming entropy & increasing consciousness.
Hi Mol. Robert Lanza has arrived (mostly coming from theoretical physics) at the same point as Sheldrake (mostly from evolutionary biology) and Henry T Laurency via Pythagorus (mostly from Philosophy) at some variation of Hylozoic theory i.e. that everything has consciousness. I’d certainly recommend his books as an introduction to the topic as they are very easy to read and an understanding of Entropy is the key to understanding the problem of recent ill thought out paradigms such as ‘the big bang’ and neo-Darwinism.
Dawkins & Co. are ignoring the materials that life is “built” from – especially WATER, which seems to have life & consciousness of it’s own > https://youtu.be/YwaNfNcurvQ
Without water nothing lives. Something made water.
Yeah Drud, that Moose mother and her calf story is Weird to say the least….normally in the wild, mothers with babes are VERY standoffish and aggressive at the drop of a hat.
Even domestic animals can be very short tempered, with people around their off spring.
I recently had 2 parent Ducks, “barking” at me, and harassing me ALL DAY, because I was working beside their pond & 6 babies 🙂
Hey, if anyone can think of websites (anti-evolution, even creationist) that might be interested in my 2 posts on Dawkins, pls either send me the links or forward the URLs your own self. It’s unlikely that pro-Darwin sites will react to it, although if they have a forum, give it a try.
Appreciate it. I’m still hoping these get around. The deep aspect of this subject is quite important, IMO, which is why I did the work.
Allan, I have been admiring these GREAT articles, by these folks on Intelligent Design for years, and they don’t go heavy on the bible stuff, even though they are religious https://creation.com/magazines
Well done Allan for another insightful essay. We seem to be inhabiting an enclosed, self sustaining world rather than a random accident.
I think these Darwin debunking posts are great. Intelligent design is hard to ignore if you are being honest with yourself. So the real question comes down to, God, or space aliens. Then again who made the space aliens.
Well, we all know God isn’t the guy with the white beard, and talking snakes & “damned to hell forever if you don’t believe bibull” etc – right??…process of elimination 😉
Thanks for these awesome posts Allan. I also asked the question to someone, did LIGHT evolve by shear chance? :-)….and the soil & water etc etc.
Brian-The Question of aliens, gods and God… “? Then again who made the space aliens.”
I have had the privilege and the time to read several times ‘The Lost Book of ENKI’… 14 tablets- autobiography- translated by Zecharia Sitchin(a hebrew scientist/anthropologist) and his team from cuneiform scrolls and tablets extracted from Babylon/Sumer/Iraq which tell a story so magnificent, and so compelling in the telling of of a tale that in the telling of that tale answers a lot of questions to those who come to the same juncture in logical procession of thought logic wisdom and truth hunting.
The story of ‘ENKI’ took a a few years to coalesce in me noggin from science fiction to plausible history(or at least 400,000 years of earths history. I do not take the story as fact because it appears there are other cosmic forces in the mix that we are not allowed to know about or the real story, even though movies, books, plays, use allegory to describe what our DNA/Psyche’s are screaming at us – that we are not alone that there is a force out there/ here/everywhere and it is the unified field known as LOVE the OM the “Let there be light” and “it is good” which all life devolves from that light knowing physics/quantum and waveform mechanics Tesla theory and there are many impersonators, gatekeepers, disinfo specialists and those(fallen beings) claiming they are co-creators in what is known as ‘visible life’ claiming to be gods and we are to worship them (which is a big cosmic no-no) and back to that HaploX2a Gene
segue into-
Knowledge = Power… Wisdom = Love – Love is all powerful but unbridled power is not love, at least wielded in the hands of mortal man or Demigods posing as god’s (little ‘g’ like on the back of the dollar bill) who are counterfeits to the creative force of love which even ‘they’ are supposed to be worshiping. Even if ‘they’ were involved in the fashioning of modern homosapiens within their alien workshop they are not our God even if ‘their’ fingerprints are all over us and in our DNA strands- it would be akin to our modern day biologists creating artificial life (A.L) not A.I and then claiming they are god to that being/life form and the biologists are supposed to be worshiped by that created (A.L) life form or else be deleted erased cancelled etc. etc. etc. this is some (Blade Runner) metaphysical postulating going ons… im sure you get my drift. I know Allan does (at least I hope he does)
True History is hidden from Humanity by the gatekeepers and their disinfo agents of chaos.
However! The voice inside of us, from our DNA, is telling us what occurred, as well as from the celestial music created by the cosmos and the voice of God himself- it is known as the ‘still small voice’ and that voice of LOVE! when I am in a quiet place that voice says ‘Love’ we are the children of love, we are the children of light, we were not created for wrath, we are love’s crowning jewel of creation- and to get over yourself 🙂 and that help is on the way but it will get much worse before it gets better, but none the less- help is on the way and we are loved!
Thanks Alan for the platform and community that we have the freedom to express our viewpoints and discuss important issues that have intrigued mankind for thousands of years.
Intelligent design most definitely! the Watchmaker is not blind he is just letting us learn by our own doing, otherwise how else would we truly learn…
Aloha T
my punctuation is terrible. run on sentences in the above reply. i do apologize for the quality of the rant. however, there is substance to be pondered…
Yes, some editing would have been good but I agree that there is stuff to be pondered. I’m interested in both intelligent Design and the 23 – 24 pairs of chromosome disparity b/c they conflate with the POSSIBILITY that Sitchin was basically right about genetic engineering in our past, and how these issues may be an aspect of another kind of design as revealed by ‘the moon numbers,’ which I covered in past posts. How the numerical relationships between the sun, earth and moon match or are related in ways that — like the evolution odds — cannot be by either ‘chance or necessity.’ The interesting thing about the moon numbers is that they indicate that the ‘designer’ WANTS us to know the truth. Otherwise, why have the numbers related. ‘Who Built the Moon’ is a book to start looking into this.
Then there are the gold mines in South Africa recently discovered. 250,000 years old, apparently, and which agree with the Sumerian texts info. Sitchin died before the revelation. He would have been pleased. Wild stuff.
(Btw, the reason the I.D. folks don’t want to hear about the above is b/c being Christians this is not the kind of ‘designer’ they want to see evidence for. Too bad: gotta go where the evidence leads!)
Spot On!!!
Aloha Allan great post and your on to something!
Wheeewww…
Just getting caught up and these pieces will take some time to digest. Ultimately eugenics seems the agenda.
Re: Sitchen… another resource worth taking some time to look into is the work of Nikolai Levashov and his writings on the Rus and Slavic Aryan history. Lots of dot connecting as to the great lengths taken to demonize and destroy Russia from the 19th century up through today. They are somewhat hard to follow though in his ‘From Russia With Love’ series (especially parts 1 and 2) Thomas Williams covers the Levashov material extensively. I believe it is in part 2 that the genetic engineering is described. If interested I can dig up the exact passages to save some time.
I appreciate your work as it stirs up much to ponder…
Andrew, yeah, if you could save me some time, send the passages or link…
Great stuff Allan and Crusty!….and I have never had a problem understanding your posts, and soaking them in Crusty. Hey, I have been told (several times over history) *God* is a WHITE LIGHT , that is all around us and throughout the Universe, – outside our spectrum of vision.
Yes, the Moon is absolutely fascinating beyond belief, please watch this beautiful video on it’s “can’t be there by chance” awesomeness (hope this isn’t off subject Allan?) https://youtu.be/DhTagWzkjHk
Brett, that moon video has some good info but their repetition about Apollo is a giveaway that something ain’t right. It’s called NLP. You come away thinking a lot of stuff, including ‘I guess they went to the moon after all.’
Any researchers who go that deep into fringe stuff have to know about the Apollo fraud.
Same crapola as put out by that guy…. whatsisname? Hoagland.
Yep, I am definitely awake to their ‘believing? Apollo got to the moon’ …. they seem to be “too nice”, and won’t come out guns blazing about the space race Fraud with it.
Here’s a video published yesterday that sheds light upon terrestrial evolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7D5JdgRv3o&t=219s
NOTE FROM AW: I WARNED YOU ABOUT USING A FAKE EMAIL ADDRESS. THIS WILL BE YOUR LAST COMMENT UNTIL YOU USE A REAL ONE. ALSO, YOUR LINK IS UNRELATED TO THE POST.
X
Sort yourself an email fella. I recommend Xtothepowerof33@gmail.com .
Use a vpn and public computer if you are of a nervous disposition.
And stay on topic 🙂
Well, I thought it was on the topic of evolution.
The thing is, the evolutionary key that Allan hasn’t yet touched upon goes by various names, including ‘punctuated equilibrium’. If he dares touch it, he will then have a thread which if tugged will not only provide a far better understanding of evolution, but can also help unravel 9/11, Apollo, Elon Musk, etc.
The video I linked to provides such a thread.
I could even have riffed on Hamlet to suggest that Allan read Hamlet’s Mill, which explains how mankind’s mythology (especially ‘Hamlet’) encodes knowledge of the punctuations that disturb the equilibrium.
I will use your suggested e-mail – though this will change my icon. 🙁
If I DARE touch upon punctuated equilibrium? You must mean the out of date S.J. Gould theory from about 30 years ago (or more)? I tugged on that thread around 2000 and it’s now irrelevant.
I read Hamlet’s Mill around 2014. Recommended by everyone, so why not. Good book. But it seems you’re a bit behind the times altho i see you are still ‘cryptically’ holding back your arcane knowledge. Too bad for us.
Good to hear you have read Hamlet’s Mill, Allan.
So, what do you think the ‘mill’ symbolises? And why is it so important that it pervades myth?
Metaphoricallly speaking, what is ground out by the mill?
For awhile I had been seeing a cow moose and her calf wandering up and down the river bank where I was camping. I also saw bear tracks and assumed there was a bear after the calf. One day I was watching the moose and calf walk towards my camp then they turned on the trail that lead to my camp. I raised my gun, not at them but just in the air above my head. They both turned around. I wondered if the moose thought, “he might shoot me” as that is what I implied as a bluff.
Well I don’t remember if it was that night or another one but I remember waking up because I felt what seemed like an ankle with fur,like a calf ankle. That started my heart into super beat mode as I shrunk into my sleeping bag! Then what do I feel but a nose pressing above my head touching the sleeping bag! I thought this is it- I’m dead!
But I just laid there hiding inside my sleeping bag and nothing else happened.
I concluded that to keep her calf safe they had come into my camp at night to call my bluff and raise the odds of a bear attacking the calf with human smell around. I know I am anthropomorphizing but I swear, I was not dreaming.
Some animals are smarter than we think they are. A beaver may risk his life for a short period in order to have much less risk after a dam and hut are built.Others just dig hole in the bank. They’re the smarter more advanced form of beaver, although less industrious and more dirty.
I sure was wondering how this related to the post but i guess you pulled it off in the end….
In the first part I was wondering how the moose knew what the gun was,if indeed she did, and how she knew, that in certain circumstances, that getting close to a human could bring safety to her calf. Normally, if you get too close to a cow moose and her calf, the cow can attack and stomp you.
Was she born knowing this or learned it in her lifetime? There are other examples of this moose behavior, of seeking refuge within human communities.
Irrefutable. I hereby predict that you will not be the recipient of a reply from his Holiness.
Back in the day I had not noticed the incongruity of the of ‘blind watchmaker’ title or the misappropriated meaning of the hamlet analogy. Both seem so obvious now but both a good example of how a non specialist can add value to a debate and spot what others may miss. Thanks for taking the time to write.
Yes, being a ‘non specialist’ frees one up to think outside the box and maybe notice stuff the experts did not. Like the second eye issue. Michael Behe responded to that with this (an excerpt):
(Darwinists) would tell you that, no, a new eye would not have to evolve. Rather, a mistake in copying the DNA instructions on making an eye might result in two eyes. [AW note: This would be a miraculous one-off mutation!] That situation would, of course, be akin to a birth defect in an organism accustomed to one eye. But the point is the Darwinists would indeed claim that a second eye would not have to evolve “from scratch”.
If this is ‘the best’ a Darwinist could come up with — according to an I.D. biologist of his expertise (and who ‘noticed’ irreducible complexity) — I must have hit on something.
Interestingly, my query as to if anyone else had noticed this went unanswered, which I took to mean ‘no’ in subtext. Looks like even a brilliant guy like Behe has an ego about noticing stuff.
Allan. As I said before I think most Darwinists would claim that since Bilateral symmetry was a relatively early development then an organism has no more trouble developing two eyes than it does two nostrils and two ears.
I think there are therefore two separate issues:
1. Is bilateral symmetry satisfactorily explained by neo-darwinism ?
2. Is the development of the (an) eye satisfactorily explained by neo-darwinism ?
Obviously a negative to either of the above and you need a new theory for the origin of the species so I don’t personally see an advantage to conflating the two.
I think i dealt with ‘bilateral symmetry’ if briefly, but the bottom line is that naming it does not explain it. As usual, Darwinists don’t actually deal with HOW it would work. What are the mutational STEPS that would lead to BS (perfect!)?
Other questions arise: Why not two penises? Two hearts? Are two kidneys an example?
We take it for granted that we have two eyes, ears, etc., but that’s lazy. Explain it! is my response to BS.
P.S. Point being that BS is a great example of ‘Design’ in action. To say that random mutation/natural selection takes credit for it demands a step by step of HOW that occurred. I don’t see that coming.
Yes but how much DNA needs to ‘accidentally be copied’ for an eye to be duplicated let alone functional. There argument is still unsubstantiated due to odds alone.
Great post Allan and mostly impressive comments this time. Maybe a first.
Hi Todd. Well as you probably know there are genes for position (what bit of the organism goes where) HOX being one example. If you then develop some miraculous mutation that develops a light sensitive organ, and the necessary neural plumbing to make use of it (and the nous to know what to do with this new bit of information) – all at the same time I might add – then it is not such a big step to imagine that your positioning genes are going to make two of them because what goes on the right must go on the left (if you are of the evolutionary lineage ‘bilateria’)
In other words I personally see this as the least problematic of the steps in the evolution of binocular vision. Then again if the first three or four necessary steps are all improbable to the point of being practically impossible, I suppose the last step (making two) is impossible by definition.
As Allan points out the evolution of Bilateral Symmetry itself (but only externally symmetrical in many cases) is another nail in the coffin of neo-darwinism but then that could be said about most adaptations – for all the reasons Allan has alluded to.
GB (October 2, 2019 at 10:19 pm),
“if you are of the evolutionary lineage ‘bilateria’”
Do you know whether DNA encodes both (Left plus Right) and (Left minus Right), the way FM stereo is done (or joint stereo in MP3, for anyone born too late to know FM radio)? Are the differences between the two sides of my face encoded in my DNA, or are they just independent mistakes in the construction of my face from the DNA?
“if the first three or four necessary steps are all improbable to the point of being practically impossible”
Maybe the first impossible thing, before breakfast, is the emergence of DNA, itself. I mean the transition from the existence of no DNA to the existence of viable DNA able to replicate itself, plus, unless it could survive on its own, a suitable organism / cell to contain it. (OK, DNA is theorised to have developed from RNA, but 1. that still seems a significant transition, and 2. the prerequisite emergence of RNA is not vastly less impressive than a direct emergence of DNA.)
Hi Denis. Conventional wisdom holds deviations from the symmetrical form are mistakes, the fewer you have the ‘fitter’ you look to a prospective mate (symmetry is associated with ‘fitness’ in most organisms inc humans). That doesn’t mean to say that in my opinion these have been satisfactorily explained however; because I doubt very much that the complex differences between the finger prints on my right and left forefinger are ‘mistakes’ in the conventional sense. Explanations for this deviation from BiLatSym include ‘differential pressure in foetal development’ but I don’t believe there has been much research on this. Conventional wisdom also holds that a cell has no way of determining if it is on the left or right of an organism (more likely we just haven’t found it) – c.f. with fore and aft ‘awareness’ as indicated by the detected concentration of the hormone ‘morphogen’.
DNA/RNA evolution: I couldn’t agree more.
A bunch of books pointing to possible third way(s) of evolution. I haven’t read any of them. Just seemed like a good site for this conversation.
https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/books?&page=20
Yes, some good ones. Try ‘Evolution 2.0’; I forget the author’s name but it’s a semi-new take on I.D. and get’s you thinking.