Counter-Currents
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Evolution is the political correctness of science, the one scientific theory that cannot be questioned. Biologists can lose their jobs for doubting it. Droning nature shows on television inculcate from our birth its certainty. We are assured that only snake-handling primitive Christians disbelieve, and that all scientists affirm it, which they don’t. Most who wonder have the good sense to shut up about it.
The many clandestine apostates raise multitudinous questions, of which in a later column, but the greatest and most accessible doubt is called irreducible complexity (IC). The faithful avoid this matter with irrepressible obduracy. but let us ponder it.
Before considering examples of IC, let us make sure we understand the principle of gradualism, the bedrock of Darwinian theory.
Supposedly, new biological features come about by the gradual accretion of slight modifications due to mutations that are beneficial to the organism or, perhaps, at least neutral. Evolutionists agree that most mutations are harmful and die out quickly, but, they say, from time to time a favorable mutation occurs and increases the fitness of the organism, as for example by increasing muscular strength or resistance to disease. This gives the possessor a higher chance of surviving, reproducing, and passing on the new and beneficial trait. The next mutation furthers the process, gradually leading to an increasingly fit organism. This, at any rate, is the theory.
The likelihood of this accounting for the increase of qualities like strength depends on such elements of population genetics as mutation rates, population size, rate of reproduction, and number of sequential favorable mutations needed to produce the feature. The first and last are seldom known. However, that a series of beneficial mutations must occur is agreed.
Irreducible complexity refers to the observation that a great many features occur in nature that cannot have evolved gradually because many parts would have to appear simultaneously, the entire system being useless if any element is missing.
Darwin himself foresaw this possibility, saying:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case. — The Origin of Species
In this he was more honest than his followers. In fact many such examples can be found. We will examine several throughout this monograph, but start, carefully, with a hornet.
The Hornet’s Sting
Perhaps the clearest example of irreducible complexity is the stinging system of the hornet. This consists of several distinct parts: (1) a biochemical mechanism to produce the venom, (2) a sac to hold it, (3) muscles to express the venom through the stinger, (4) the stinger itself, (5) muscles to force the stinger into the victim, (6) nerves to control both sets of muscles, (7) muscles to retract the stinger if it is to be used more than once, and (8) the instinct to use the sting. These must exist simultaneously and function in coordination in order to work. Absent any one, the system is useless.
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The question for the Darwinist is how the system can have evolved gradually. The answer is that it cannot have: All components would have to have appeared at once, which is impossible by gradual accretion of mutations. (We will here ignore the additional observation that the various parts themselves cannot be the result of single mutations. One mutation, meaning an accidental change in DNA, cannot produce a long, perfectly “machined” hollow tube precisely integrated into the venom sac and attached to the necessary muscles, which themselves would require multiple mutations.)
Nature-show evolutionists sometimes argue that the stinging system evolved from the ovipositor of other insects. The evidence offered for this is that both stinger and ovipositor are tubes used for depositing something somewhere, and both exist only in females. This makes no sense for the same reason of requiring multiple simultaneous mutations, some to produce the venom, others to produce its sac, others to attach the sac to the ovipositor. At this point the insect could not lay eggs as it would have a stinger but no ovipositor, and so would need a simultaneously appearing alternative means of reproducing. People offering this “explanation” are engaging in liberal-arts evolutionism, regarding Darwinism as a vague force for improvement while ignoring practical impossibility.
The whole argument over the completeness of Darwinian evolution rests on the foregoing case of the sting. Hundreds of books, hundreds of thousands of pages and articles have been written on evolution, full of passion, politics, weasel-wording, religious babble, smokescreening, and forty-weight righteousness. The sting, however, is the perfect test case. What some judge says, or this or that Biblical whatever, or dozens of infuriated biologists or lawyers is irrelevant. If the advocates of evolution can explain the evolution of the sting by gradual accretion of slight steps, then it will be reasonable to suspect that all instances of irreducible complexity can be explained. If they cannot so explain, then Darwinism fails, or is at least incomplete. The question is that simple, embodying no argumentative sleight of hand or esoteric knowledge. If you know a Darwinist, preferably an evolutionary biologist, ask him for his explanation.
Don’t let him change the subject or dance away from the question. If my considerable experience is a guide, he is likely to begin denouncing evangelical Christians or dive into, “Alas, poor Fred, poor silly fellow.” Or he may say that irreducible complexity has been debunked. What he will not do, I promise, is give a specific answer to the specific question of the hornet. Try it.
Whether the sting evolved is a question of fact: It did, or it didn’t. If it did not evolve, how in fact it came about is a matter of speculation. Knowing how something didn’t happen doesn’t require knowing how it did happen. I am quite sure that my 14-month-old granddaughter did not kill Jimmy Hoffa. The certainty does not obligate me to know who, if anyone, did kill him.
A suggestion that drives believing Darwinists into frothing fury is that the hornet may have been designed. If it did not evolve, and looks designed, they say, then maybe it was designed. Yes, maybe. But also, maybe not. A third possibility is that the hornet, and for that matter everything else, arose by means that we haven’t thought of, and perhaps cannot think of. One reason for fealty to Uncle Chuck is that the theory, like religions, provides a comforting sense of understanding origin and destiny. People do not react well to suggestions that this security blanket is false.
(My personal belief is that the Great Pilot of the Cargo Cult, of which I am an adherent, ejected the universe from the cargo space of a holy C-130. This makes as much sense as any religion, and I like airplanes.)
Countless examples of irreducible complexity exist, easily discoverable by asking by what gradual steps a feature can have come about. For example, skunks defend themselves by ejecting at predators noisome gunch from specialized anal glands. Starting from a proto-skunk, how could this mechanism have evolved by gradual steps? Did our skunk-to-be have digestive problems leading to chronic flatulence that discouraged fastidious carnivores? The chemical mechanism producing the gunch, the glands to hold it, the muscles to expel it, and the instinct to do so have to be simultaneously present. This lacks the crystalline clarity of the example of the hornet, but is hard to explain.
For the interested reader, the following examples of irreducible complexity may be of interest. However, some of these, such as metamorphosis in insects, offer scope for desperate couldamaybe arguments of sufficient vagueness to blur the issue. The hornet’s armament is the gold standard. If the Darwinist cannot answer this, the debate is over.
Consider the horn of the rhinoceros, which, a Darwinian would say, evolved to protect the beast from predators. Note the commingling of two distinct ideas, first that the horn protects the rhino, which is obvious, and second that it evolved, which it cannot have. We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in the Darwinian gospel that we assume that anything serving a purpose must have evolved to serve that purpose (“evolved to . . .”: always the language of purpose).
Even to a layman, at the macro level the horn’s evolution makes no sense. The horn is made of keratin, the protein of hair and skin, not of bone. This seems to imply that the horn must have formed from congealed hair. This would require — excuse the flip tone, but it has the virtue of being compact — a Hair Sticke’m Together mutation, assuming that one mutation would suffice. But why on the forehead and not all over, or on the left hind leg? So now we need a highly specific Hair Sticke’m Together Laterally Centered on Forehead mutation. Presumably we would then have a clump of clotted hair of no use whatever to the semi-rhino. Next, a Stuck Hair Grow Like Crazy mutation, since the thing would be of no value until long enough to poke lions. Then we need another mutation to give it a perfectly ovoid shape, not an obvious measure for survival, and then a Grow Faster in Middle mutation, to give the aborning horn a point. Presumably there is a Don’t Grow Too Much mutation to keep from growing and growing and turning the rhino into a unicorn.
Since Darwinian evolution works through the accumulation of many small beneficial changes, each of which must favor survival, there should be intermediate fossils in different states of hornization. I can find nothing online about these intermediates. I strongly doubt that there are any, but should they exist, they would establish the fact of the horn’s evolution, though not the mechanism. (Remember, it is the mechanism that the thousand scientists specifically doubt.)
To show that the horn might have evolved through the accumulation of mutations, would it not be necessary to show which and how many genes code for the horn? And thus how many mutations and which? If, reductio ad absurdum, one mutation could do it, then the mutational theory would be plausible. If 150 mutations were necessary, it would be mathematically infeasible. And of course each of these mutations would have to be beneficial enough to become fixed in the population. Good luck.
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Then there is the botfly, a squat, ugly, hairy fly that catches a mosquito, lays its eggs on said mosquito after positioning it correctly, and attaches them with a kind of glue that it just happens to have at hand. It then releases the mosquito. When the little feathery syringe lands on, say, a human, the eggs drop off, hatch, and burrow into the host. These make nasty raised lumps with something wiggling inside. Later they exit, fall to the ground, and pupate.
How did this evolve? Did a grab-a-mosquito gene occur as a random mutation (assuming that a single mutation could cause such complex behavior)? It would have to be a grab-a-mosquito-but-don’t-cripple-it gene. That is an awful lot of precise behavior for one mutation. At this point, the botfly would have a mosquito but no idea what to do with it. It would need simultaneously to have a stick-eggs-on-mosquito mutation. This would seem to require another rather ambitious gene.
Catching the mosquito without laying the eggs, or squashing the mosquito in the process, or laying eggs in midair without having caught the mosquito, would seem losing propositions. Yet further, the glue mechanism for making the eggs drop off onto the host instead of before or not at all would also have to be present, caused by yet another complex simultaneous mutation. None of these awfully-lucky mutations would be of use without the others. How do you evolve this elaborate dance by gradual steps?
Metamorphosis in insects: You Can’t Get There from Here. Straight-line evolution, for example in which Eohippus gradually gets larger until it reaches Clydesdale, is plausible because each intervening step is a viable animal. In fact, this is just selective breeding. Yet, many evolutionary transformations seem to require intermediate stages that could not survive. Metamorphosis in insects is perhaps the most baffling example.
Consider: There are two kinds of insect, two-cycle and four-cycle. Two-cycle bugs lay eggs that hatch into tiny replicas of the adults, which grow, lay eggs, and repeat the cycle. The four-cycle bugs go through egg, larva, pupa, adult. Question: What are the viable steps needed to evolve from two-cycle to four-cycle? Or from anything to four-cycle?
Let us consider this question carefully.
We begin with a two-cycle bug, that for convenience we will call a roach, which will endeavor to evolve into a bug that, also for convenience, we will assume to be a butterfly. The roach has the insect’s standard body plan of head, thorax, and abdomen, and the usual chitinous exoskeleton. From a spirit of charity we will assume that it is a flying roach to give it a head start toward butterflyhood.
To achieve that exalted end, our roach would first have to evolve into a caterpillar — that is, a larval form. It is difficult to see how this could occur at all, or why. To become a caterpillar, our roach would have to lose its jointed legs, exoskeleton, and body plan. Since not even the most hopeful evolutionist could attribute such sweeping changes to one mutation, the transformation would have to proceed by steps involving at least several and probably many mutations. Losing the exoskeleton would leave it unarmored and unable to walk, not an obvious selective advantage. Or do we believe that head, thorax, and abdomen first merged mediated by a long chain of accidental mutations under mysterious selective pressures , and then it lost its exoskeleton and became, well, bait?
But if these things did happen, they would lead to a free-standing race of caterpillars, a new species, necessarily being able to reproduce. Then, for reasons mysterious to me, these would have to decide to pupate and become butterflies. And the butterfly would have to lay eggs that became caterpillars.
Which could not possibly work. Metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly is enormously complex, and if you don’t get it right the first time, it’s curtains. It would depend on a great many steps which would have to appear simultaneously — but never mind. Unless it wanted to pupate in the all-together, it would need to make a cocoon, in which it would proceed to die because it hadn’t yet evolved metamorphosis. Why a caterpillar would think of doing this is not clear. To turn successfully into a butterfly, it would need the biochemical machinery to transform a mushy, legless, wingless, head-thorax-abdomenless worm into an utterly different creature. Where would it have gotten the impossibly complex genetic blueprint of the butterfly?
Methinks something is going on that we do not understand.
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49 comments
A most thought-provoking article, though I am tempted to be resistant if only because it feels needlessly aggressive in handling the man behind the theory as quasi-responsible for the actions and agitations of his blind adherents. I find it worthy of noting, given the mention of hideously parasitic forms of reproduction like botflies, that such developments were themselves faith-shaking considerations for Mr. Darwin, who professed that he could not conceive of a gracious monotheistic capital-G God thinking such creations acceptable (in his case referring to those buggers what lay their eggs in caterpillars, or was it aphids?—nasty little devils regardless of whom they’re subverting, them). Yes, unfortunately, not just thought experiments such as here but also active scientific research calls into question the universality of foundational concepts like “survival of the fittest” on which the current model of evolution rests. There’s really no need to toss it out forthright, but clearly the way things work in this mundane world is decidedly… fantastic. I think Mr. Darwin would maybe be honored if we found it necessary to forge new ideas overtop his Leviathan, vulture-stripped remains? Minor sidenote: I was within the past year exposed to religious television (ouch) where a gentleman described with glee how simple it is to marry the current understanding of the universe with generalized Christian theology. As their has always been overlap between science and spirit, this was mostly untroubling—what I took particular issue with was his characterization of organic processes as mechanical. By that view, we’re already bio-robots… yes, we will definitely need some new ideas.
Those are interesting questions, for sure. I’m an atheist, so if you or anyone else is going to suggest god, I definitely don’t accept that. But if not god or evolution, then what? I guess the process of evolution is more complicated that just incremental genetic change. You should look up the researcher Michael Levin. He works at Tufts university. He talks a lot about the role of bioelectricity in guiding pattern formation. Perhaps the development of all these features was guided by a higher-level physical attribute, and the genes just allow the cells to function. Levin has also talked about the change from caterpillar to butterfly in some YouTube videos.
Until we have a viable answer to the question: “Why are we here?” I’m not sure why you would be so confident about the non-existence of God, as conceived of by the elder Pliny.
The biochemistry of organ formation and growth is fantastically complex and remains but poorly understood. However the case of a pupating insect is not that dissimilar to any other embryo, the difference being the larval stage must secure its own food supply from the environment rather than utilising a yolk sac and then rebuild a larger egg shell before emerging as a fully grown adult. I am not an evolution fundamentalist and certainly not an expert but it may just be almost beyond our imaginative powers to reconstruct all of the primordial events which led to today’s natural world.
I’d be interested to see what Scott has to say on this question.
All it takes to debunk the existence of God is to look at all the suffering. There’s no way God would allow this world to exist. Not even free will is a good justification. Think about all the suffering in nature. Animals get killed by predators, rivals, infection, disaster, et cetera. They can go days without eating. Sometimes when whales are too old to swim to the surface, they drown. Why would God create a system like this? This is terrible. The circle of life could just as easily be called the circle of death (and misery). And then humans came into existence. Humans have created even more misery for animals, and for other humans too.
God created an infinitely expanding universe and put all lifeforms on one planet just so they could go around killing each other. Why would he do that? Everyone knows that makes no sense. There is definitely no God. So, the only explanation is evolution.
Joe583,
Your thinking is backwards. The Problem of Evil is a formidable one indeed, but it cannot refute the existence of a Creator where there is smoking-gun like evidence. You may not like God, but that is a separate matter. Or, like me, you can assume that there is something we don’t understand yet.
If you are aware of any worldview that solves all the conundrums of our existence and leaves nothing mysterious, let me know.
Like you, I tend to think that a certain degree of humility is the most appropriate attitude when confronting metaphysical issues.
What is God’s power? He manipulates DNA? If the intricate structures of biology are evidence of God’s existence, where’s the other evidence? Why doesn’t he make intricate cloud forms, or something? Why not create a beautiful land with brightly colored trees, and cascading waterfalls, and glowing flowers? Like something you would see in Avatar. Or why not create really complicated machines that aren’t sentient and can’t feel pain?
And where are the mermaids, or centaurs, or dragons? A lot of species do, generally, resemble one another. There is no animal on this planet that just popped into existence. You can trace everything back to an ancient ancestor. Doesn’t that imply evolution? I don’t know how the rhino’s horn evolved, but if God made rhinos, then why would they even need a horn in the first place? Why did God make predators to attack rhinos? Why did God make any life at all? He fine-tuned the universe for life, and created hornets so that other animals could get stung by them and feel a lot of pain…? He created humans so that we could wake up, eat, go to work, watch tv, and sleep… He won’t give us anything that we need in life to be happy, but he’ll manipulate the structure of proteins… Or the sequence of nucleotides…
Either God is an idiot, or he doesn’t exist.
The answer an old Christian Brother gave us in our 11th grade religion class was that if we followed God’s teaching we would alleviate the suffering. All our suffering comes from our disobedience. We do it to ourselves. It does seem like those who live Christian lives are able to avoid a lot of the suffering in this world. And I don’t mean people who say they are Christians while they are leaving the brothel after spending the night at a strip club.
The ‘if everyone just acted one way everything would be okay’ argument is pretty self-serving. The problem is that ‘Christianity’ has always been in schism and – besides ‘pagans’ and other ‘heathens’ – ‘true Christians’ have seemed despise and engage in violence against other ‘true Christians’ for as long as there has been organized Christianity. So, I think your Brother was wrong about ‘true Christianity’ being the solution. It’s just another part of the problem. And that problem is ‘Chosenism’ in all it’s forms including the Abrahamic form.
The answer an old Christian Brother gave us in our 11th grade religion class was that if we followed God’s teaching we would alleviate the suffering. All our suffering comes from our disobedience.
Quite true. The free will defense explains a great deal of suffering in the world now. God is not a wet blanket who makes arbitrary rules to spoil our fun. He is our Creator and knows what is for our good and what is not.
On the other hand, I think the question of obedience is complicated in Christianity. It seems, by our nature, that we are made to solve problems. I’m not sure that it would be possible for us to be real fully-fledged humans in a Garden of Eden. Was Original Sin a felix culpa? Surely, Christ was not some sort of Plan B. I find Philip Hefner’s Christian humanist idea of the created co-creator compelling in this regard. It is arrogant, I know, but the fact is that Christianity raises humanity to the very highest place it can logically occupy. One step further (denial of God altogether) and you reduce man to a sophisticated beast, nothing more.
I don’t know if you’ve read Screwtape Letters, but C.S. Lewis gets around the problem by claiming that God can always make something good out of evil, but he had other (and greater) goods for us in mind. What those might have been I can’t imagine, but then maybe that is just a function of my own limited understanding.
The ‘problem of evil’ (suffering) is the best argument against God’s existence, but there are probably 15 or 20 other responses rather than just the ‘free will’ defence.
“Evil” is not a thing a its all simply perspective and lack ot undertanding from the leftist perspective your also “evil”
Leibniz’s three hundred year old idea that this might be the best of all possible worlds remains possible if unproveable. Suffering and evil are the things which allow us to savour comfort and goodness and what would life actually be like without struggle? These are problems with which the would-be rulers of the world will have to grapple.
“Evil” exists because people simply have competing needs and wants
Man wanted absolute freedom and got it. Only the current specificity of the universe gives it without imposing that God definitely exists and, accordingly, without influencing the freedom of all of us. God is the cause, but not the author of Evil. A world of absolute freedom without evil is impossible. Man got what he wanted, God only gave it existence.
Your idea of God is a Supreme Being who injects heroin into every last living creature so that feel no pain ever. Sure, they go through life in a complete stupor, bu so what? They feel no pain. Since there obviously is no such Supreme Being doing that, there’s no God. But all you’re doing is setting up a definition that supports your pre-existing criteria and conclusion. Maybe your criteria are wrong, and God has a reason for allowing suffering that escapes you.
Your idea of God is a Supreme Being who injects heroin into every last living creature so that feel no pain ever.
This brings up an interesting question. Isn’t the opioid system (receptors, endogenous opioids, and plant-based exogenous opiates) itself a partial answer to the Problem of Evil/Pain? Unfortunately, people sometimes abuse these substances, so they become less effective at controlling pain because of our poor choices.
I have always been rather surprised at the strength of the natural pain defenses. When I was younger and still learning to cook, I burned myself more times than I can remember now, but didn’t notice it until after I served dinner and lost my kitchen adrenaline rush or endorphins or whatever it was. Then, I couldn’t fall asleep without a cold pack. Of course, I learned how to avoid burns pretty quickly.
Apparently all vertebrates have opioid receptors. Wouldn’t that suggest that these things are very old, as if the problem of pain was anticipated from the very first vertebrate brain and did not in fact evolve over time? Or maybe they are not old, and the opioid receptive organisms had a competitive advantage and replaced their predecessors? I would love to see an analysis of the opioid system from an irreducible complexity point of view.
Every believer in God has this idea that God is unconditionally right. Jim Goad recently wrote about women who put their children in ovens and microwaves. What could possibly have been the reason for God to allow that? I could understand if God allowed some suffering to teach a lesson, but there is excessive suffering in the world. If your child did something wrong, you might reprimand them. You wouldn’t set them on fire. But God would…
I don’t want people to be loaded on heroin 24/7. That’s not the only way to avoid pain. God created our brains, so he could have created them with us already knowing every lesson he wants us to know. Pain is a means to an end (learning to avoid danger). God can go right to the end, and skip the whole pain thing, but he didn’t, because… why? And why would God care if we went through life in a stupor? He apparently doesn’t care about anything else. This is why every God hypothesis makes no sense. God is inconsistent with everything he does. He fine-tuned the universe for life, yet 99% of the universe is inhospitable to life. He created life even though 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. He had no problem getting involved in the past, setting all this up, yet he is completely absent today. He used a lot of intelligence to create all the DNA and all the regulatory mechanisms of the DNA, yet people are born with genetic disorders that ruin their lives and may even end their lives.
It’s absurd. At best, you could say there is some kind of conscious force manipulating the anatomy of organisms. But then why don’t we see radically different forms? If this force created a rhino’s horn, it had to have known what the horn was going to be used for, which means it had to have cared. Why didn’t it create bullet-proof skin to protect rhinos from poachers? It’s just answering one mystery with a bigger mystery.
The Problem of Evil is not a problem at all. In the first place, “good” and “evil” are entirely human-made concepts, they exist entirely in our heads, just like whatever any religion has got to say about God. A supreme being, presiding over the entire universe, would certainly have no care for such things. So “God can’t exist because muh suffering!” is a nonsense sentence. Why would He, or as I should say It, since such a being would exist before sexuation, really care about the suffering of living beings? More than likely, probably anything that could physically happen, is alright to happen, in God’s eyes. It made the laws of nature, didn’t It? Or maybe we could say that anything that causes us to cease to exist is probably going against God’s Will- there’s a right way for life to behave, and life that doesn’t behave that way, gets wiped out. That’s how humanity is going right now.
Lane said it best:
“1. Any religion or teaching which denies the Natural Laws of the Universe is false.
2. Whatever People’s perception of God, or Gods, or the motive Force of the Universe might be, they can hardly deny that Nature’s Law are the work of, and therefore the intent of, that Force.
3. God and religion are distinct, separate and often conflicting concepts. Nature evidences the divine plan, for the natural world is the work of the force or the intelligence men call God. Religion is the creation of mortals, therefore predestined to fallibility. Religion may preserve or destroy a People, depending on the structure given by its progenitors, the motives of its agents and the vagaries of historical circumstances.”
You’re a mental contortionist. God wants life to behave a certain way, but at the same time he doesn’t care about anything that happens to individual creatures… And if that’s true, then why didn’t he create our brains in such a way as to compel us to always act that way? If God wants us to act a certain way, then he values wellbeing. He at least values the wellbeing of that behavior. If he values X, then anything that goes against X is harmful to X. Harm is therefore objective, which means good and bad are objective, which means right and wrong are objective, which means evil is objective. It is not just in our heads.
Wow, I’m surprised, but delighted, to see this here at Counter Currents. Darwinism is a sinking ship, and the movement needs to be prepared for that.
Whether the sting evolved is a question of fact: It did, or it didn’t. If it did not evolve, how in fact it came about is a matter of speculation. Knowing how something didn’t happen doesn’t require knowing how it did happen. I am quite sure that my 14-month-old granddaughter did not kill Jimmy Hoffa. The certainty does not obligate me to know who, if anyone, did kill him.
Come now, Mr. Reed. Darwinists know perfectly well that there is only one conceivable alternative to random chance mutations + natural selection + 4 billion years = Mozart: God. The God of the Gaps retort only works when the trends favor scientific materialism, and that hasn’t been true for decades. Really, it never was a very good argument. The whole debate went like this:
Skeptic: We don’t need God anymore because science explains everything.
Theist: Well no actually science hasn’t explained everything.
Skeptic: God of the Gaps! Bible Thumper! It’s not science! Blah blah blah.
But why are people so resistant to the idea of Intelligent Design, if that is where the evidence is leading? Wouldn’t it be a good thing to find out that we’re not just specks sitting on a speck that’s orbiting a speck in the middle of a vast universe of specklessness as Bill Nye the Science Guy tells us? Well, no, because
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/jerkology/202306/to-combat-absolutism-scientists-must-explain-life
And the answer to the question you’re asking yourself is yes.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201408/im-not-self-hating-jew-im-tribe-unexceptionalist-jew
(My personal belief is that the Great Pilot of the Cargo Cult, of which I am an adherent, ejected the universe from the cargo space of a holy C-130. This makes as much sense as any religion, and I like airplanes.)
Woe is me. So much nonsense so little time. You know perfectly well, Mr. Reed, that a closed system requires a transcendent cause, an Uncaused Causer. Though, I do agree with you that religions don’t make any sense. The only reason I’m a Christian is because every alternative, including scientific materialism, is even more absurd than the Gospel.
White people have a tendency to disdain the familiar (because you can see the corruption up close) and romanticize the exotic (because you can’t). I have said for years that Buddhism, seen as a more rational, humane, and tolerant alternative to Christianity in certain circles, is past its peak in the West, though I didn’t realize just how on point my criticisms were until recently. It was never clear to me why, once you sit and cross your legs, it ever makes sense to get back up again.
Sure enough, apparently that sometimes happens, for real. People have lost their kids to State care because they won’t get up off the zafu. They decide they’re bodhisattvas and kill themselves so they can reincarnate and get on to their next mission, etc. I have often wondered what ever would have become of me had my nerd in jeans and T-shirts never come along and given me not just one but a whole house full of reasons to live. Well, now I know.
https://youtu.be/d9GN4dvIFro?si=MuEj-43aAU7WS9r5
Anyway, all jokes aside, I think that is why certain people in our movement constantly bash Christianity and idealize the pagan past. I am not very knowledgeable about conflicts between pagans and Christians in the early Middle Ages, and I am sure there were myriad atrocities against pagans that I would never attempt to minimize let alone defend. On the other hand, I suspect that an intimate familiarity with Viking terror against monks who were trying to preserve old pagan stories in writing for future generations, albeit with a Christian spin, would lead many to the conclusion the Nordic invaders were more savage than noble. By the same token, the very fact that they saw so much that was worth preserving complicates the view of early Christians as destructive, genocidal fanatics, though, as I said, I am sure there was more than enough of that also.
While I’m at it, a pet peeve of mine, and I believe one of the roots of anti-Christian feeling among Whites, is the very simplistic monotheism/polytheism dichotomy. According to this view, polytheism is both good and authentically European, while monotheism is bad, intolerant, and alien. It belongs to the “Abrahamic tradition,” and therefore aligns Christians more with Jews and Muslims.
There is obviously some truth to this Intro to World Religions level oversimplification, but it clearly is a massive oversimplification. Personally, I see a great deal more of my own Christian God in Odin All-Father than in that genocidal Jahweh who is apparently still telling Jews to go and exterminate people. (BTW doesn’t “All-Father” have a somewhat universal ring to it? Am I missing something? Please advise.)
The hard line between polytheism and monotheism is artificial. With syncretism, polytheism tends to slide into monolatry or henotheism which tend to slide into monotheism, which in turn generates its own pantheons, both local and universal, of one sort or another. You can’t have an epic showdown between good and evil with just one God, after all. You need angels, rebellious and loyal, for that. And then, of course you have canons of saints, avatars of the Twelfth Imam, God-bearing Virgins, etc. Even the most uptight Protestants actually believe in the Incarnate God-man, for which other “Abrahamics” accuse them of… paganism/polytheism.
By the way, contra the view that Christianity is essentially nothing more than Judaism with a pinch of Greek, it turns out that the Romans invented Christianity after all, seeing it as a unifying force for the Empire. JCI and JCII were actually the same dude lol (ISBN 10: 9059113969; ISBN 13: 9789059113961).
Of course, I don’t believe that Jesus was Ceasar, but I do think that the two figures may have been conflated to some extent in the minds of ancient illiterate people with no internet connection. The populist Ceasar was known for embracing his enemies in an attempt to bury the hatchet, unite the people, and move on. He also “redeemed” the debts of friends who would otherwise have been reduced to debt bondage. There are many more comparisons to be made along these lines, some more intriguing than others.
The thesis is interesting not because the two were really one and the same but because of what it tells us about why Christian themes would have appealed to our ancestors, the overwhelming majority of whom were destitute and completely vulnerable to the whims of a vicious elite that sent them off to risk life and limb in wars, confiscated their farms, and replaced them with foreign slaves at home. Plus ça change…
Fred wins the argument. Just this short article puts “evolution” in the dustbin. Trouble is, people who’ve been told they were “smart” since they were kids have been told that in order to be “smart” one of the things they are required to believe in, is “evolution”. The careers of far too many “smart” people depend on them reciting beliefs that are obviously, and demonstrably, false, and they are unable to hear proofs, or even arguments, against their faith. I recently showed a leftist relative (through marriage), the stats proving that blacks are less likely to be shot by a cop than Whites are. He refused to believe even the fbi numbers. Against his religion.
Good stuff. You might enjoy Lieutenant Kinderman’s whimsical musings in William Peter Blatty’s novel Legion. A sample:
“One more thing about evolution. They keep saying that it’s chance, all chance, and that it’s simple. Billions of fish kept flopping up on the shore, and then one day a smart one looks around and says, ‘Wonderful. Miami Beach. The Fontainebleau. I think I’ll stick around here and breathe.’ So help me God, so goes the legend of the Piltdown Carp. But it’s all a schmeckle. If the fish breathes the air, he drops dead, no survivors, and the playboy life is over. So okay, that’s the fable in the popular mind. You want it better? Scientific? I am here to oblige. The real story is, this mackerel who came in from the cold doesn’t stay on the shore. He just takes a little breath, a little whiff, a little tryout, then he’s back in the ocean in Intensive Care and playing his banjo and singing songs about his jolly times on land. He keeps doing this, and maybe he can breathe a little longer. Also definitely possible; maybe not. But after all this practice, he lays some eggs, and when he dies he leaves a will saying how his little children should try breathing on the land, and he signs it, ‘Do this for your father. Love, Bernie.’ And they do it. And on and on it goes, maybe hundreds of millions of years they keep trying, each generation getting better and better because all of this practice is getting in their genes.”
Google “walking catfish”
A great book that touches on this is Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen Meyer. A couple of notes about evolution from him:
Chance alone cannot create a functional protein. The origin of a single modest functional protein by chance arrangement of amino acids is 10 to the 164 power. Even over the history of the universe, this chance would be vanishingly small.
The Cambrian explosion and other evolutionary events were sudden. But macromutations should produce dysfunction. Only minor variations could be viable and heritable.
For every DNA sequence that generates a short protein fold of 150 amino acids, there are 10 to the 77 power nonfunctional combinations that will not form a stable 3 dimensional protein capable of performing a biological function.
Even over 3.8 billion years on Earth, life wouldn’t have evolutionary time to search for functional proteins randomly.
Natural selection does nothing to generate functional DNA base sequences. It can only preserve such sequences once they have originated randomly.
dGRN is developmental gene regulatory networks. They control animal development. New animals can only arise out of re-wiring existing genes through GRNs. But GRN mutations always cause catastrophic loss of body parts. Re-wiring GRNs would require multiple coordinate change in the sequences of gene bases and timing of gene expression. This would need a substantial infusion of functional information.
You can destroy the stability of protein folds with between 3 and 15 random mutational changes. Yet to turn one protein into another requires many more than 15 changes. It’s like introducing random mutations into a computer program. Random changes almost always degrade function.
Pick up his book, there’s a lot more. It’s not just about evolution.
Excellent article, Thanks.
I believe this article is looking at everything backwards from a human perspective. It’s looking at horns, beetles, larval stages of bugs and treating them as end points, finished machines with some exclusively current purpose in this moment created by something.
It’s just possible the process of life doesn’t care that one kind of animal (humans) finds this stuff of remarkable complexity and as end points or finished machines.
Sure, if we had to make it ourselves you’d have giant corporations and factories and scientists run by Elon Musk just trying to recreate the stinger of the hornet or something, but it’s not how this seems to be working in nature.
This term fitness is misleading. Adaptivity, or ‘happening to still exist’ in some circumstance, in some moment is a better term. Organisms, through the dice roll falling into some new adaption and eventually form to more specific circumstances perhaps; environmental, food, even social and sexual. Although it does raise some questions how these changes are immediately passed on genetically. I imagine they are not most of the time. But very occasionally they are.
I don’t think anyone should ‘like’ evolution. I question whether it’s even healthy for humans to think about it, and it should never satisfy us as a replacement for our religious or higher selves, but it’s probably the best scientific theory we have yet.
Blacks are literally a kind of living transitional fossil between apes and humans.
Ann Coulter, in her book “Godless,” runs through this argument in the last four chapters of that book. It’s quite a ride, and just those chapters are worth the price of the book. She cites numerous scientists who take this position, one of whom, Michael Behe, wrote a book called “Darwin’s Black Box” way back in 1996. She also referred to the brilliant David Berlinski whose essay in Commentary magazine in the early oughts was a complete demolition of the evolutionist’s position. If people find this subject interesting, I highly recommend these other sources.
This free range discussion on evolution all boils down to that ancient question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
In the movie, “Adaptation”, the character based on Florida Man John LaRouche, aka, The Orchid Thief uses Darwin’s positing of the existence of a moth with a 12” proboscis after he was sent the orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, which had a similar length nectar tube. Sure enough the moth was later found. This was supposed to be some definitive proof but no where is there a clear explanation as to which came first. Perhaps they co-evolved. Still, we need an explanation for this possibility. Adaptation and selection may be important factors in solving this problem, but they may turn out to be ingredients that will be folded over into a sort of omelette of the ultimate answer.
People are always asking these questions that maybe Man was not meant or capable of knowing. It has never stopped some from probing—which suggests the possibility that there is an answer we can grasp. It’s scrambled more than a few brains in the process. If there wasn’t an attainable answer why would there be a mind intent on knowing…Another super hard-boiled question that is hard to crack.
Maybe it would be wise to take the Benedict Option and just gather and save information that will one day provide an answer.
Perhaps we should take the sunny side option, go over easy with it and take some compensation for all this questioning in that we can just relax, play our part, and spot our flower.
https://youtu.be/S3pIuy69UE8?si=4UcJGRxbHgdqVQ5Y
It baffles me how people can so readily jump to conclusions right into the Theater of the Absurd. If the wasp’s stinger is inexplicable and irreducibly complex, how can one suddenly jump into Intelligent Design? I get a chuckle out of thinking that ID (God) created every single variation of intestinal flatworm to make the lives of its other creations miserable. Picture God’s noblest creation, Man…with a roundworm poking out of his anus. God might be intelligent, but He’s one sonofabitch with an incredibly poor sense of justice and humor.
Anyway, the God of the Gaps has become smaller and smaller over the centuries. So with the hornet’s stinger, we solve the problem with an unfalsifiable and magnitudinally more complex answer: God?
C’mon…
Anyway, the God of the Gaps has become smaller and smaller over the centuries.
Not so. The God of the Gaps has been getting bigger for some time now. The hornet’s stinger is a relatively minor problem in the scheme of things. How do you even get a self-replicating living cell to begin with? Indeed, what are the chances that the laws of physics would even support life if not specifically designed to do so (fine-tuning). Richard Dawkins tells us that he is going to have an answer to the fine-tuning problem real soon now. Two predictions: He won’t have any such answer, but he’ll go on being a militant atheist anyway.
So with the hornet’s stinger, we solve the problem with an unfalsifiable and magnitudinally more complex answer: God?
The falsifiability standard is out of favor with philosophers of science, in no small part because it fails to take account of human nature. Dug-in scientists tend to generate “auxiliary hypotheses” (epicycles, multiverses, etc.) to explain anomalies rather than concede. We have long since passed the point where the materialist worldview can lay any claim to superior parsimony or simplicity.
Moreover, you assume that materialist and teleological causes are mutually exclusive when they are not. To adapt John Lennox’ charming analogy: suppose Daddy comes home from work and asks why there is a pot of boiling water on the stove. My son says, “Well you see Dad, when water reaches 212 degrees fahrenheit…” Well, of course, he wouldn’t say that. That is an explanation of sorts and it is true, but it’s not the kind of explanation Daddy wanted. Knowing this, my son would say, “Mommy is making tea” or spaghetti or something else that starts with a pot of boiling water.
Physics is mostly descriptive and circular. It allows us to understand how nature works and manipulate matter to our advantage in all sorts of wonderful ways, but it doesn’t provide a causal explanation of much at all.
Again, it all boils down to the same explanation; to wit, we don’t know, so let’s say God did it.
It’s ok to say we don’t know instead of using God as the answer. The same God, btw, who made worms just for our anuses.
I think the sting of Hymenoptera can be explained incrementally. It would start with a weaponized spur on the abdomen, perhaps related to a vistigial ovipositor. Remember that most Hymenoptera are asexual drones, so they wouldn’t mind damaging this structure, evolutionarily speaking. As a weapon it is rapidly selected for and then some sort of caustic secretion begins on it. There are animals with venomous spurs, such as the duck billed platypus. Due to its effectiveness, the organ gradually becomes highly specialized as we see today. It’s sort of the same argument for the development of the eye, a highly specialized compartmentalized organ that is the same across many species. Due to its effectiveness and the number of incremental steps in creating it, all examples of them go back to one common ancestor. You can turn this around and say, if the stinger it was made by intelligent design, why didn’t god put it on non hymenopteran creatures? Hymenoptera is the class that encompasses bees, wasps, ants. Are there any non Hymenoptera animals that have a similar abdominal stinger? It’s a very large and highly successful group, maybe the largest.
This is a great post. I appreciate that you actually made a logical argument rather than trying to shut down the argument with artificial compartmentalization (It’s not science!).
I don’t know about whether any non-hymenoptera critters have abdominal stingers, but I certainly agree with your basic premise that so-called “convergent evolution” is more likely on the assumption of common design than common descent. This raises the question of why the clever octopus is over there all by himself in the invertebrate family tree when it seems he belongs, cognitively speaking, with primates. Oh well, no more fried calamari with marinara sauce, I guess.
Also, if you’re interested in bugs, you might check out Eric Cassell’s Animal Algorithms.
I grew up Atheist, but now I believe it is impossible that things came out of nothing. I believe it makes sense a god or gods made the world.
I also believe that a society without a spiritual belief is unhealthy, and will cling to some kind of belief system anyway – one that could be detrimental. Is the leftism of today not also like a religion?
I don’t believe Christianity is what we need, but I don’t see a problem with a society wide belief in God or gods per se, and in my view if it was localised to each people – the Greeks with theirs, the Scandinavians with theirs, and so on – I see that as a healthy expression of origin from each different people, and I think that’s compatible with nationalism.
As for the evolutionary theory stuff, the biologist would just say that evolution is more complicated than we at first realize, and has been going on longer than we can really rationalise.
I don’t know my response to that, and other issues, for me I just think it’s not possible that there was nothing then there was something, and that that happened for no reason, just random chance. Some contend that maybe it didn’t come into being, but was always there : I’d suggest that all things we know about appear to have a beginning. It is rational to also put the planet itself into this category of having an origin and lifespan.
This stinger example reminds me of something else more complex, the reproductive system. Replace the stinger with a phallus and we can see even more complexity.
(1) a biochemical mechanism to produce the [sperm], (2) [testicles] to hold it, (3) muscles to express the [semen] through the [phallus], (4) the [phallus] itself, (5) muscles to force the [phallus] into the [female parts] (6) nerves to control both sets of muscles, (7) muscles to retract the [phallus] if it is to be used more than once, and (8) the instinct to use the [phallus]. These must exist simultaneously and function in coordination in order to work. Absent any one, the system is useless.
That only includes the male half of the equation. The female needs to have the complementary parts in order for the whole system to work, so we’ve vastly increased the “irreducible complexity”.
Yet even with the increase in complexity, reproductive systems are found in every living creature. If nature can find a way to create the sexual reproductive system, it could surely find a way to create a simpler sting defense mechanism in multiple related species (wasps aren’t the only insects that have a stinger or venom).
If nature can find a way to create the sexual reproductive system…
How do you know that “nature can find a way”? You’re begging the question, and egregiously so.
I’m no expert on these things, but even I can see that the arguments Fred and other commenters make are overblown. Let’s take this “irreducibly complex” hornet’s stinger, which Fred says is “perhaps the clearest example”. He lists eight things that he says must have come about simultaneously, “absent any one, the system [being] useless”. Here’s his list: (1) a biochemical mechanism to produce the venom, (2) a sac to hold it, (3) muscles to express the venom through the stinger, (4) the stinger itself, (5) muscles to force the stinger into the victim, (6) nerves to control both sets of muscles, (7) muscles to retract the stinger if it is to be used more than once, and (8) the instinct to use the sting.
Now, a stinger with no venom is not useless, so right away we can strike off numbers 1, 2, and 3 as unnecessary. A stinger that can be used only once is not useless, so we can strike number 7 too. Now, let’s consider the mentioned hypothesis that the stinger evolved from an ovipositor. That would likely be a vestigial ovipositor as DarkPlato notes. This, by the way, would already give us the rudiments of numbers 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and perhaps part of 8. Rudiments of the rest of #8 can also be seen. The instinct to use the sting comprises two parts: the muscular contraction to drive the stinger into an attacker, and the trigger to activate it. The muscular contractions in sting and venom deployment would be similar to two things that already exist: ovipositor function, and the self-defense reflex of curling up when attacked. The self-defense reflex of curling up when attacked is already triggered at a useful time for stinger deployment: when attacked.
So we’ve already dealt with everything except #4 – remember, we don’t need them to be fully formed, only rudimentary or unnecessary. The only thing left is the stinger itself. It’s obvious that a beautifully formed, very sharp stinger could evolve from less perfectly shaped but still useful stingers, but I’m no expert on bug combat so it’s hard for me to say just how pointy a pointy bit needs to be before it would be useful as a weapon. It’s entirely possible that it didn’t start out as a stinger. Many wasps dig in the dirt, so perhaps it simply started out as a hard bit for digging.
Anyway, the idea that this is just impossibly complicated – so complicated that it just couldn’t happen – is silly. That doesn’t mean we know evolution is therefore the right answer. Let’s look at what we do know.
* We know that all life on earth is genetically related in a big family tree with common ancestors that appear to go back billions of years. We know this confidently from DNA analysis and it’s confirmed by other lines of less sophisticated evidence.
* We know that selection pressures (whether natural or artificial) are effective at molding organisms over time. (Consider the evolution by artificial selection of the wolf into the chihuahua over mere thousands of years. It would have been much faster still if they had set out to breed a chihuahua right from the start.)
* We know that an allele only needs to be very slightly better to outcompete other alleles. If an allele only gives one out of a thousand individuals additional offspring over a competing allele, that’s enough for it to spread.
* We know that evolution by natural selection occurs because we’ve seen it in real time (on a small scale) over spans of decades. We also know that much larger-scale evolution by artificial selection occurs, because farmers have been breeding animals for millennia and we have records. (And there’s no fundamental difference between natural and artificial selection pressures.)
* We know that mutations occur, and that new, useful features can come from them. We’ve seen this in real time, and we’ve seen it both in nature and in the laboratory.
Now what don’t we know?
* We don’t know the ultimate origin of life. Where did the very first life forms on Earth come from?
* While we have seen with our own eyes the evolution of new adaptations and new species, we haven’t personally seen the evolution of new “kinds”, i.e. entirely new families of life. (But even so, we have fossil evidence of whales evolving from an animal like a deer!)
* We don’t know that every important feature evolved naturally, as opposed to via divine creation or some other hypothesis. But we’ve never seen a proven counter-example either.
Maybe God created the main families of life a billion years ago and let them evolve from there. Maybe God created the whole world six thousand years ago but wanted us to think everything evolved so he put fake fossils in the ground and ginned up our DNA to look like an ancient family tree. You never know!
It’s fine to say we don’t know the answer to a question. Nobody knows for sure how the hornet’s stinger came about. It’s even fine to say “because nobody knows for sure, I’m not going to believe it was evolution.” But it’s not a respectable argument to say “because I personally don’t know the answer, therefore God did it”. I mean, you can say that, but it won’t convince people.
Anyway, even I can see that the hornet’s sting is not all it’s cracked up to be.
You believe that the stinger could have evolved gradually. OK, where is the evidence for this? Are there any transitional fossils? I am not familiar with the natural history of this particular family, though I adore them, wonderfully fashy as they are. I am somewhat familiar with the history of odinates, however, and my understanding is that the magnificent dragonfly appeared out of nowhere 300 million years ago and has remained exactly the same since, only smaller.
Darwin himself was aware that the fossil record did not support his theory, but he assumed that, over time, transitional fossils would be found. Well, that hasn’t panned out. I know what you’re going to say. Just because we haven’t found them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In an absolute sense, that is true, but in terms of probabilities, there are going to be diminishing returns. How long do we look before we decide that, in all probability, we’re not going to find it? Maybe we should stop pretending that evolution is the only reasonable explanation for this stinger, persecuting scientists who aren’t convinced, refusing to allow any discussion of the explanatory shortfalls of scientific materialism in classrooms, etc.
Another problem here is that you assume homology demonstrates common descent rather than common design. You can group motor vehicles, built with standard parts, into “family trees” if you like: SUVs, compact cars, minivans, motorcycles, sportscars, etc. Why would you assume that God would only make one kind of monkey or one kind of cat?
I’m also not sure you’re right that evolution can create new creature features. Michael Behe took on this issue in Darwin Devolves, the idea being that microevolution (the only kind we know happens for sure) tends to work by breaking genes rather than creating new codes. I haven’t read the book. Have you?
Finally, I really don’t understand this claim that it is not legitimate to conclude that there must have been divine intervention once exclusively natural causes have been ruled out. It is a simple either/or syllogism, as follows: Natural processes either have the creative power to produce a given form or they do not. If they do not, then something outside of nature must have produced the form. If it transcends nature and has creative power, what can it be other than God? Please explain. Don’t people usually find this sort of argument unobjectionable most of the time?
I have been thinking a great deal about post-modern epistemology lately, and I am happy to report that, after years of bewilderment, I finally understand it, or at least I think I do. Most people like to pose as rational, disinterested seekers of truth, but most of us really aren’t, at least not about everything. I’ll go ahead and ‘fess up right now. I’m rooting for God. How about you?
My impression is that the difference between believers and skeptics on this issue has to do with proof standards. It appears to me that you have concluded that only absolute, deductive proof of the existence of a Creator will do, regardless of probabilities, failed predictions, intuitive simplicity, etc. Am I right?
“because nobody knows for sure, I’m not going to believe it was evolution”
Few of us are denying evolution, per se; we are sceptical as to whether the mechanisms that are said to be driving it – natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, what-you-will – will prove to be fully adequate explanations.
But it’s not a respectable argument to say “because I personally don’t know the answer, therefore God did it”.
It’s not respectable because it’s a false dichotomy. If naturalism fails, then there are other possibilities besides the Jehovah one. How attractive you find them, depends on how allergic you are to metaphysics.
That’s a good point. All insects with that particular stinger mechanism of Hymenoptera are probably closely genetically related. There’s no insect with precisely the same stinger that’s closer genetically to say dragonflies. Moreover, one sees intermediate forms which are still extant. The honeybee sting kills the bee when used. It’s more primitive than that of the wasp, but has remained around as a species because honeybees attack en masse and can be used as cannon fodder. Sort of like white evangelicals by Zionists in the middle east(jk). The greater evolutionary advantage of honey production outweighs the disadvantage. They are under no evolutionary pressure to develop a retractable multiuse stinger. No creature smaller than bears can fight them for their honey, so they are under no evolutionary pressure to develop better defenses.
The stinger could start simply is a thumping with the abdomen of the insect. When hive creatures use this en masse, it could be effective. Like a headbutt. Any mutation that hardens the area or makes it more effective would be selected for then.
oh, and I thought of an answer to my own question, scorpions have stingers. But I don’t think they work precisely the same way.
Francis Parker Yockey on Darwinism
As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts.
https://varapanno.blogspot.com/2023/09/francis-parker-yockey-on-darwinism.html?m=1
SURVIVAL OF THE FAKEST AFTER IT WAS PUBLISHED IN 2000, MY BOOK ICONS OF EVOLUTION got rave reviews—filled, not with lavish praise, but with furious denunciations.1,2
Several critics wrote that I was stupidly trying to discredit evolution just because of a few textbook mistakes. According to evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, “Wells’s book rests entirely on a flawed syllogism: hence, textbooks illustrate evolution with examples; these examples are sometimes presented in incorrect or misleading ways; therefore evolution is a fiction.”3
Biologist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci wrote, “Because there are omissions, simplifications, and inaccuracies in some general biology textbooks, obviously the modern theory of evolution must be wrong. This is the astounding line of reasoning that is the backbone of Jonathan Wells’sIcons of Evolution.”4Kevin Padian and Alan Gishlick of the militantly pro-evolution National Center for Science Education made the same point, heavily seasoned with scorn: “The Whine Expert: Wells reminds us of those kids who used to write to the letters page of Super-man comics many years ago. ‘Dear Editor,’ they would write, ‘you made a boo-boo! On page 6 you colored Superman’s cape green, but it should be red!’ Okay, kid, mistakes happen, but did it really affect the story? Wells cannot hurt the story of evolution; like a petulant child, he can only throw tantrums.”5But if the icons of evolution were really just a few textbook “booboos,” biologists would have quickly corrected them. This point can be illustrated with an actual example from a physics textbook. The 1997 edition of Prentice-Hall’sExploring Physical Sciencecontained a photograph of singer Linda Ronstadt holding a microphone, and the caption identified her as a silicon crystal doped with arsenic. The following page had a drawing of a silicon crystal doped with arsenic, accompanied by a caption about the usefulness of solid-state microphones. Obviously, the captions had been inadvertently switched. John L. Hubisz pointed this out in a Packard Foundation report on mistakes in physical science textbooks.6Of course, the publisher corrected the mistake in subsequent editions. Imagine, though, the following scenario: The identification of Ronstadt as a silicon crystal appears year after year in almostallscience textbooks. The caption is consistent with other materials in the textbooks promoting the theory that human life is based on silicon rather than carbon. And the theory is vigorously defended by establishment science, even to the point of vilifying its critics. Obviously, we would no longer be dealing with a mistake, but with a deliberate campaign to convince people that life is silicon-based.
If the icons of evolution were just innocent mistakes, as Coyne, Pigliucci, Padian, and Gishlick claimed, then the icons would have been corrected in subsequent textbooks, just as the Ronstadt-as-a-silicon-crystal error was quickly corrected in the physical sciences textbook.
ZOMBIE SCIENCE
MORE ICONS OF EVOLUTION
JONATHAN WELLS
I’m not Christian, but a steel man answer to the problems of suffering and evil is due to the fact that overcoming hardship is itself beautiful (regardless of religious/metaphysical disposition). This heroic insight might be hidden deliberately by design, so that the willing may savour the gravitas of this epiphany once grasped. The atheist camp winds up resigning to nihilism without this understanding, if not intentionally, since the universe is now a functioning Cthulu nightmare designed to crush the individual through the framing of this favourite objection.
Note also that blind adherents of Darwinism seem to conceed to Lamarckism by way of rhino horns “evolving to defend” (i.e. function defines form); this evolutionary theory did not in fact win out for the fittest model of biological change over time for the various problems it posed.
You can take every sermon ever delivered, every hymn ever sung, every holy book and pamphlet and tract ever printed, every prayer ever prayed, for every religion that invokes a supernatural deity that has ever existed….and I’ll refute it all with a single word.
”No.”
That which is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.
That which is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.
Congratulations. You have officially gone off the deep end. Literally, even militant atheists and philosophers don’t attempt to make this absurd claim anymore, if they ever did. You can argue about the weight of the evidence, but no reasonable person can claim that there is “no evidence” for the existence of God.
https://youtu.be/hHXXacBAm2A?si=NmCkkyPquDxMpY4I
Let’s hear some evidence. Better speak loudly so I can hear you down at the deep end.
I would need to borrow Metallica’s sound system to have any hope of reaching you all the way down there, because you fundamentally do not understand the meaning of the word “evidence.” Let’s have a look at the definition used in the federal courts and many states. Evidence is relevant if it “has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence.” Notice that it doesn’t have to be compelling proof all by itself — persuasive case can be made from numerous minimally probative elements.
Atheists have traditionally considered bits of evidence, such as the hornet’s stinger, one piece at a time. Finding it inadequate as “proof,” they forget all about the hornet’s stinger and move on to the next piece of evidence, also to be considered in isolation, which they likewise refuse to credit. Quelle surprise!
Enter Richard Swinburne’s “cumulative case” for the existence of God, which is really just common sense when you set aside the traditional error-avoidance bias of the dedicated philosopher (the Cynics, apophatic theology, Descartes, logical positivism, etc.) As William James (The Will to Believe) points out, the skeptics offer no justification for their demand that ordinary, reasonable people accept this bias. Indeed, they cannot, because (almost) everything is unknowable, and it’s verboten to “impose” one’s subjective values on others, is it not?
The alternative (and better) truth-seeking bias would indicate that the appropriate standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not), which is the standard of evidence used in civil cases. A higher standard of evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt) is appropriate in criminal matters because of the additional imperative of avoiding error, even at the expense of the guilty sometimes going free, especially in capital cases.
Theists are 100% justified in accepting the lower standard, or indeed an even lower one. If atheists are entitled to their bias against false theism, we are likewise entitled to our bias against false atheism. Yes, I know you can withold judgement, but the practical effect of that is a life without God (functional atheism). (In my opinion, even hopeful agnostics, earnestly seeking the truth [Matthew 7:7], are entitled to identify as Christian if that feels right culturally, because really we’re all agnostic, unless we never, ever have doubts, but that is another can of worms).
A really dumbed-down summary of the cumulative case can be found here:
https://youtu.be/XT1DGbqQSOc?si=UFi1e7BN922NliJE
Ultimately, you’re going to have to read a book or two or three to understand the arguments, but if you’re not willing to do that, then why are you participating in the debate? Remember, this isn’t really about whether you are personally persuaded by the evidence. The question is whether scientific materialists are entitled to repress any opposition to their world-view on the grounds that
1. No reasonable person could possibly disagree with them.
2. Theism is dangerous or destructive, and
3. Atheism is harmless.
If I am trying to convert you, it is my burden to prove something to you, but if one side of a debate is attempting to silence the other, it is their burden to prove that such draconian actions are justified.
Wow Lexi. I wrote two sentences. You wrote two novels. Including a history of the concept of “evidence” in jurisprudence, a quote from the Bible, and an impressive list of philosophers and such.
Also, I might add, the second of two ad hominem attacks you’ve lobbed at me.
Not very Christ-like, n’est-ce pas?
Ok. The video. My word. You described it as “dumbed down”. Let’s save time and shorten that to “dumb”. I’m certainly dumber for having watched it. Although it did demonstrate the difference between “cumulative evidence” and actual, you know, evidence.
There’s no time to address all his stupidities. I’ve still got to shovel the drive and get dinner on the stove. But let’s run through a few.
Only God can explain the multiverse along with all the other considerations. Who said there’s definitely a multiverse? It’s a theoretical construct in the same family as dark matter and string theory.
Man is the ultimate arbiter of what is moral. Haha RUKM? Himmler, Pol Pot, John Wayne Gacy, and Ken Lay have left the chat.
Bickering scientists can’t agree on an explanation, but God can explain everything, seamlessly. Very cool. Except….which god? The god of Judaism, or Christianity? Islam’s god? Buddhism’s god? Vishnu? Osiris? Krishna? Zeus? Dionysius? It’s gonna be a hell of a conference call to get this straightened out!
There must be a worldwide straw shortage after constructing all these straw men. And then to just knock them all down? Tsk tsk what a waste.
Lexi I’m not trying to silence anyone. I don’t give a rip what you believe. I will say, however, that atheism IS pretty harmless. We are a tiny minority, de facto barred from public office in the U.S., with little to no cohesion or organization. How does one prove, much less promote, a negative? But a heckuva lot more people have been killed and tortured and a lot more wars have been started in the name of religion than in the service of atheism.
Okay Lexi. Good talk. You believe your thing, I’ll believe mine.
Btw: you can only insult me one more time. After that, we are no longer friends.
Au revoir!
@Tommy
I think it’s a big call to say that atheism is harmless given the record of communism and liberalism over the last hundred and seven years. It might be fine for the intellectually minded and indeed many senior churchmen have been at least agnostic (although they still loved the church), but most people need the structure of a tried and tested religion, for lack of which they can be made to believe just about anything, witness the present day.
Evolution is the political correctness of science, the one scientific theory that cannot be questioned. Biologists can lose their jobs for doubting it. Droning nature shows on television inculcate from our birth its certainty.
And for good reason! We wouldn’t allow one that denies continental drift to work as a geologist. I wouldn’t allow those that deny racial differences to work as psychologists or anthrop0logists either, but that’s another topic.
Perhaps the clearest example of irreducible complexity is the stinging system of the hornet. This consists of several distinct parts: (1) a biochemical mechanism to produce the venom, (2) a sac to hold it, (3) muscles to express the venom through the stinger, (4) the stinger itself, (5) muscles to force the stinger into the victim, (6) nerves to control both sets of muscles, (7) muscles to retract the stinger if it is to be used more than once, and (8) the instinct to use the sting. These must exist simultaneously and function in coordination in order to work. Absent any one, the system is useless.
This is all utter nonsense. A stinger is perfectly useful without venom. Wasps will string multiple times even after the venom is depleted. Why have roosters spurs? Venom is still useful without an injection mechanism or sac; nearly all snakes and lizards have venom in their saliva. The muscles that push out the stinger are the same that push out the ovipositor that it evolved from, and a stinger is still useful without muscles to push it inn and pull it out (again, think of a rooster’s spur). And bees have a stinger without the muscles to remove it; they die after stinging. Not a single one of these things needs to evolve in tandem with any of the others. The stinger could evolve first, then the muscles that push in it and out, then the venom, then the sack to hold it, then the injector. Or the venom might have evolved before the muscles to push it in and out. There is any number of ways that it could have happened, and obviously so for anyone possessed of any imagination.
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