In column 09-05, I outlined my differences with Darwinian evolution. I only mentioned intelligent design as a note to the column. In column 25-05, I mentioned it once again, pointing out that because empirical science is founded on laws made up by men with deep religious beliefs, laws that empirical science has kept while discarding the religious beliefs that produced them, it left itself open to clever manipulation by the intelligent design proponents. In column 29-05, I hit the subject once again, mainly because it was heating up all over the country. It got so hot, in fact, the empirical community stopped arguing the issue of evolution by proclaiming intelligent design "unscientific by definition." See column 01-06. Finally, although I didn't make a note of it, The American Association for the Advancement of Stupidity (AAAS) proclaimed that the most progress in any area of science in 2005, was made in the field of evolution.
My first note on Intelligent Design would have been my last mention of it, but the whole thing amuses me immensely. In column 14-06, I seized on a ridiculous comment in the Playboy Forum about how evolution was as self-evident as gravity. I can understand why Playboy's readers would be concerned about gravity, given what it eventually does to boobs, but the interest in evolution puzzled me, and I presented it as simply a way for empirical science to indoctrinate as many boobs as it could. After all, a true science wouldn't give a fig about whether people thought humans evolved from apes, meteors, or the idyll activity of a God, so long as it was relying on reality. The only type of people that attempt to control the thoughts of other people are religious fanatics, and the rabid reaction of empirical science to intelligent design, a quasi-religious explanation for evolution, indicates that's what they are, religious fanatics attempting to defend the religion of empirical science. See column 01-06.
But empirical science must really want to inculcate the boobs with evolution because it next published not one, but five articles on evolution. The first article is an overview of the subject, equating intelligent design to creationism, and then saying as "Karl Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce," he could only view the intelligent design controversy "as something from the French theater at the end of the 19th century," when farces were indeed popular. I guess creationism is the tragedy here, intelligent design the farce. Species evolution as it's taught is the tragedy, and the farce is the fact that empirical science bothers to address it, instead of addressing the obvious defects in species evolution. In fact, the composite picture captioned in the overview of the articles underlines this point. Using a conglomeration of paws, the caption reads: "The recent discovery of tool-kit genes has allowed evolutionary biologists to understand how a diverse animal kingdom can be made from a few building blocks." Great, and I hope that's what they're doing, but it has absolutely nothing to do with species evolution, or anything else Darwin proposed, and in fact, everything to do with my view of evolution as characteristic which, by the way, was pretty much Darwin's grandfather's view of it.
The article later gets into the nuts and bolts of Darwinian evolution, but since that's the only place it's described in the five articles, I'll dispose of the other four before we come back to the nuts and bolts the nuts defend.
I recognized the name of the author of the second article, Daniel Dennett, although I couldn't place him. He was identified as the co-director for the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, but the title of his book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, didn't set off any bells, so I started in on the article. Dennett's reasoning, however, seemed familiar to me, so I did an Amazon check on him. Sure enough, way at the bottom of a list of religious sounding tomes appeared Consciousness Explained. I read this book in the early 90s and keep it with my extensive collection of books on the mind. It influenced me tremendously, not, however, in the way Dennett intended. In a 500-page book called consciousness explained, not a single page explains consciousness. I had written a book in the 70s called Who's Fault is My Fault in which I attempted to sketch a picture of how a mind might work that could produce the unique "I" that is everyone's essence, the "I" that can create, make choices, suffer and exult. It never got anywhere, but I read Dennett's book during the time I was writing the drafts of Atoms, Stars and Minds, and contemplating Dennett's ignorance of his chosen subject matter meshed into my view of a single elementary particle (column 17-04) which allowed me to make the proposition at the beginning of ASM that if the particle could explain everything we see in reality, and it could also produce a structure that would explain how we perceived that reality, it would be as close to an objective check on the accuracy of the particle we'd every get. I added the final four chapters of ASM doing just that, and followed it with The Model Mind.
In his Playboy article, Dennett seems to have abandoned his mind altogether and prattles on about five scenarios he saw for religion destroying the world. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, he was trying to make the point that religion says we can't think for ourselves while evolution says we can, but it's not really apparent in the article and the accompanying quote by H.L. Menchen that "One of the easiest ways to get into public office is to denounce Darwin as a scoundrel" doesn't clarify anything.
In the third article, appropriately placed I guess, after Dennett's, we have the comedian Lewis Black's opinion on evolution, creationists are insane. Next up is Sean Carroll, professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin writing about how the best definition of Intelligent Design he knows of comes from, guess who, Lewis Black. Finally, we have Bart Ehrman, professor of religious studies at UNC explaining how he was raised a fundamentalist, went to Moody Bible Institute, but after several decades, slowly came to the realization that the bible was a bunch of lies, and, as a professor of religious studies, he's now a happy agnostic. His point is, people shouldn't question evolution, they should question the bible. Good argument, gets right to the heart of evolution.
So away with the boobs and back to the nuts (and bolts). The overview article, written by Michael Ruse, is titled Faith & Reason, and is, in fact, a well structured diatribe that concludes rather dramatically that these are dark times and they may well get darker, inviting readers to join the fight for the values and achievements of the Enlightenment.
Really sounds like we're talking science here - not. More like religion. Ruse starts off by telling us Darwin's achievement, the discovery of natural selection. His explanation is simple enough for me to understand it. "More organisms are born than can survive and reproduce. There will therefore be a struggle for existence, with some succeeding and some losing. All this adds up to a kind of winnowing process, or as Darwin called it, a natural selection. Over time this leads to full-blown evolution."
Full blown evolution, I take it, is species evolution. The reason the statement is simple enough for me to understand is, there's absolutely no connection between more organisms being born than can survive, thereby driving some to eat the others, and a fish turning into a dinosaur, or is it a dinosaur into a bird, oh heck, a monkey into us. I guess, as we continue to overpopulate an Earth that is growing cold in space and therefore becoming less and less able to support us, we'll all turn into space monkeys, or something like that, according to this reasoning, but I sincerely doubt it. We have a great example of what will happen. In the late fifties, Mao confiscated all the food of the Chinese for three years to buy planes, tanks, subs and the atomic bomb. They ate their animals, they ate leaves off trees, they ate the bark, they ate the soles of their shoes, they ate dirt, and they started eating each other, leading to an estimated thirty million plus deaths, but the result was not the natural selection of anything, it was an indelible grief. According to Darwin, though, if this had continued for a longer period of time, something else would have emerged. Don't think so.
Natural selection is, as is everything in empirical science, a construct to explain a dynamic process, evolution, with a nondynamic answer, the stronger eat the weak. It is a static answer in a dynamic world. The fact is, evolution occurs because gravity is the result of what the Earth is doing, cooling (column 02-05). As the Earth cools in space, two things are happening. First, the environment is growing colder. Second, gravity is growing weaker.
As to the first, it explains the mass extinctions recorded in the Earth's crust. When the environment is hot, there's no need for organisms to evolve self-regulating heating systems. Cold-blooded animals, such as dinosaurs, could survive in a hot environment, but when the environment grew colder, it passed their level of survivability, and they died. Mammals, warm-blooded animals, that could maintain their own internal temperature, took over in the cooler environment.
As to the second, well, I can't help raising an error that science fiction writers have so inculcated into the empirical community, it is the smoking gun demonstrating how close empirical scientists adhere to the fantasies developed in the minds of science fiction writers. I can't remember who it was, it was one of the early science fiction writers, but he created a character from Jupiter. The character was squat because Jupiter's gravity was so strong, that it didn't allow him to grow. This notion is carried over into the empirical community by the notion that a black hole orbited the Earth at the time of the dinosaurs, offsetting the Earth's gravity and allowing the dinosaurs to grow tall, or the latest absurdity on the scene, that plate tectonics, itself an absurdity mere decades old, might be wrong, that the Earth is actually expanding, with the increased mass increasing its gravity. The obvious conclusion is there was less mass in the past and thus, the fact that the dinosaurs grew so large is proof of their musings.
Large animals are proof of stronger gravity, pure and simple. For something animate to walk in a stronger gravity field, it needs stronger bones. Stronger bones mean bigger bones. Bigger bones mean bigger animals. Dinosaurs are depicted with more meat than they could possibly carry as a result of using the strength of their bones in today's lighter gravity field and computing the amount of meat that would fit on them today, when in fact, the meat that fit on them in the stronger gravity field was heavier, and therefore proportional to the meat that fits on our weaker bones. We can have weaker bones because we don't have as much gravity to animate ourselves against, and we have to have the ability to regulate our heat because the field is cooler. Natural selection was created by a man who knew as much about evolution as Hitler. It's a contrived explanation made out of the ignorance of the actual nature of gravity and the fact that both it, and the planet's heat are lessening, and as they do so, species go extinct and others come into existence. It's the same ignorance that produced the contrived global warming, whose primary evidence, rising sea levels, attributed to the notion the ice caps are melting, is actually the result of gravity lessening, and in the process, decompressing the oceans.
The article then goes on to say there is direct evidence for evolution. The first direct evidence is the ridiculous notion that resistance to penicillin is the result of evolution at work. The process of resistance to adverse conditions in living organism is well understood. There are always a percentage of organisms that are immune to the adverse conditions, and those survive, passing the immunity on to the surviving population. Saying this demonstrates evolution is like saying the Great Plague demonstrates evolution. If the Great Plague demonstrated evolution, what new species evolved out of it? No species evolves from the survival of the resistant, and the claim it is direct evidence of evolution is ignorance in action.
But not as much ignorance in action as the next direct proof. The author cites Darwin's Galapagos finches, and their difference from island to island, pointing out this difference results from isolation and therefore evolution, with the beaks changing shape. Other than the fact that the finches are all the same species, and therefore don't demonstrate species evolution or natural selection, or, as we shall see, anything else, Darwin can be forgiven as he didn't spend much time there. However, modern researchers have, and have found, without bothering to point out it refutes Darwin, in fact, quite the opposite, claiming it's natural selection in action, the beaks of the birds on the same island will go from short and strong to long and slender depending on the rainfall and the resulting food supply. This is adaptation, not evolution, although I would argue it is a form of adaptation that evidences characteristic evolution, with the finches carrying genes for both types of finches with stronger or weaker beaks to survive (the stronger, wider beaks can't get into the crevices the food fall into, allowing the longer slender beaks to survive in times of plenty, the shorter, stronger beaks that can break tough husks survive the drought in leaner times).
These are the two examples of species evolution that are always dragged out tirelessly to a public that's brain dead to reality, either because they follow the tenets of the church of empirical science, or the church of creationism.
The author follows with the most important piece of evolutionary proof, evolution is mainstream science. This is the claim empirical science makes every time it is placed in the uncomfortable position of defending its beliefs. He then compares America to the world, claiming that the Age of Enlightenment is hundreds of years old, but America, made up of people fleeing enlightenment, matured without being touched by it, turning the United States into a vast sea of ignorant religious fanatics. The enlightened Americans, the empirical scientists, all believe in evolution. They therefore have to stand fast the faith in the face of the hordes of the ignorant attacking them. This is the first time I've ever encountered the everybody believes it so it must be true argument in the context of calling anyone who disagrees ignorant, but I guess when your back's against the wall, you do what ya gotta do.
So why do the evolutionary biologists have their backs up against the wall when it is clear that evidence in the geologic record, the mass extinctions and sudden appearances of species, which is prohibited by natural selection that would leave a record, if at all, of a slow progression, and the abundant genetic evidence that is coming to light and is being used, to claim support for species evolution and natural selection when it doesn't, it all points to the reality of characteristic evolution? Why don't they just say, Darwin was wrong, species evolution and natural selection aren't the answer, the answer is characteristic evolution, the evolution of specific characteristics, eyes, fingers, legs, and these are conglomerated as necessary into species that can survive in a particular environment?
Because to do so would be to admit that the environment has something to do with evolution, and one of the basic tenets of empirical science is that the environment has been stable for at least a billion years, with occasional ice ages produced by who knows what. Because there is no mechanism to drive characteristic evolution, they continue to believe in species evolution against all evidence. As they vehemently argue against God-addled people defending an obviously erroneous conclusion, they are defending an institution, empirical science, which is founded on the basis of laws established by God, laws uncovered by God-addled people.
They should really love me because I provide the explanation for characteristic evolution. But they can't, because to do so would be to go against the most God-addled empiricist of all time and the God of empirical science, Sir Isaac Newton (column 06-06) and his fantasy that gravity is a property of, and proportional to matter.
To pursue the logical conclusions of their research, evolutionary biologists would have to utter the unutterable, and for that, they'd be punished mercilessly (column 12-06). We're stuck with what we're stuck with, and we'll never become unstuck. We'll demonstrate characteristic evolution with our mass extinction.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com