Challenging Scientism

What is Nature?

(Neo)-Darwinists always talk about the ‘laws of nature.’ No question is too difficult to answer, because the answer is always the same…

Q: How did oxygen precipitate from a barren, heat-scorched earth and bind with nitrogen and hydrogen to somehow magically combine to make the first, and second, and two-hundred-fiftieth amino acid?

A: “Natural processes.”

Q: How did hardened, arrayed, differentiated, multilayered calcium outcroppings (teeth) emerge in soft tissue?

A: “Natural selection.”
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Endless Darwinism, Most Flexible;
A non-Darwinian philosopher’s review of “Endless Forms, Most Beautiful,” by Sean B. Carroll.
by Liam Scheff

published by W.W. Norton and Co. 2006
Amazon link.

Dr. Carroll likes his rock and roll, and he’ll give you an unwanted lyric from time to time, to let you know that he’s cool, as well as really smaht. The under-title of the book, and its constant refrain throughout – the rhyming, new-wave rock-sounding “Evo Devo,” gives the biggest hint as to what’s wrong with this ‘new’ science.

The clever, cloying catch-phrase will now be employed by undergraduates, and Ph.D. candidates everywhere, to describe a myriad of processes that they don’t understand. (They’ll just sound cute and clever saying it). Carroll throws it around blithely, to cover a variety of sins.

The trouble with the book isn’t what Dr. Carroll gets right. Indeed, things develop! There are patterns to that development. Those mechanical patterns can sometimes be elucidated, even described, even tinkered with to produce horrible, horrible animals (that researchers should be remorseful for causing to suffer, but don’t seem to care much at all).

The reductionists have named genes, described some intermediary functions, given clever, populist names to their ideas: Hox genes! Toolbox genes! Do they control the birth and regulation of the entire organism? Are the great mysteries solved at last!? Read the rest of this entry »

– Collagen Molecule

I want to share with you excerpts from several items I’m reading, more or less unfiltered. It goes like this:

We’re all connected, right? Everybody says so – somewhere beneath the surface, we’re ‘one,’ part of a single organism, being, entity. Everybody’s had an experience – touching, sensing, feeling, knowing – transmitting information, thoughts, feelings, ideas, images, across a room, in the presence of a friend, or someone you’re just meeting, or in a place, or waking from a dream, or in a dream itself… We’ve all had bits and images of feelings of connection and knowing and transcendence despite our rational selves…. Despite our ’scientific, modern’ idea of an accidental, mechanical world – something we inherited from the 17th Century, caught in the wake of René Descartes’s Enlightenment discoveries of logic and method.

But to prove it? You can only say it, know it, feel it. Share it with people who understand. But prove it? Is there a ruler, a graph, a measuring stick for this sort of thing?
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You believe in evolution, no? Yes? Right?

Right, of course you do. You’re an educated individual…

So, have you read Charles Darwin? It’s not so hard to do. You can read his work – all of it – for free, online, at various websites, if you have a computer (which evolved from the abacus, of course).

So, have you read Darwin? Maybe not? Probably not. But who needs to? Evolution is true. That’s apparent. Things change. Animals change over time. Legs become fins, fingers become wing struts, scales become feathers. And vice-versa. It’s just so. We come from things that we used to be. We used to be other things. Things change! And life is connected.

Right?

Sure, why not. Life is connected, certainly – to life, to itself. And it comes from… itself. It evolves from itself into…itself. Just differently. How simple! How self-evident.

But, what is the theory of Evolution?

Well, what about it? It’s self-explanatory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact. And you do know it, even if you think you don’t. Venture a guess?

Survival of…
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I quote her with care, as she derails easily, but it’s a well-stated opinion:

“If there is any one way to confess one’s own mediocrity, it is the willingness to place one’s work in the absolute power of a group, particularly a group of one’s professional colleagues. Of any form of tyranny, this is the worst; it is directed against a single human attribute: the mind–and against a single enemy: the innovator.

The innovator, by definition, is the man who challenges the established practices of his profession. To grant a professional monopoly to any group, is to sacrifice human ability and abolish progress; to advocate such  a monopoly, is to confess that one has nothing to sacrifice.”

- Ayn Rand, “The Return of the Primitive”

Take that, peer review…

On that note, and after years of observing it, I can agree that the value of peer review truly seems to be to repress movement. “Reproducibility” should be the measure of success in any venture, and reproducibility can be seen by any 3rd grader…

I am just reading this: Debating Darwin – Adventures of a Scholar, by John C. Greene.

A wonderful mind. I regret that I didn’t look him up in 2007, when I first picked up the book…

Of all the writing in this book, his correspondence zings loudest and clearest, (as it does with many of us – we know our audience, and are trying to make our point with wit and force). His mind so nicely, cleanly and lucidly understands and separates the biologists’ fiction of having it both ways: That we have a supernaturally all-powerful, choosing, remaking, selecting and altering “nature,” always spurring on life to ‘greater’ accomplishment and ‘higher’ levels of expression; which we also and simultaneously must, by definition regard as a dead, ‘chance-driven’ evolutionary machine.

The book takes the form of several essays, together with long excerpts from considerable correspondences with two evolutionary biologists, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Ernst Mayr. Below is an excerpt from one exchange with Mayr.
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The Dawkins Delusion
Salvo Magazine, Spring 2007
by Liam Scheff

Everybody’s favorite atheist has been on the road selling his new book, The God Delusion. I’m talking about sharp-witted author and Oxford scholar Richard Dawkins. This is his latest in a long series (starting with The Selfish Gene in 1976) sharing a common theme – to expound the truth about life, the universe and everything, according to Richard Dawkins. Read the rest of this entry »

Are accidental genome shifts the engine of change in evolution? Is species evolution a process of tiny steps?

“No,” says Dr. Lynn Margulis (Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst), in her stellar book Acquiring Genomes (written with Dorian Sagan), from their catalog of excellent work, which includes Microcosmos and her remarkable Five Kingdoms (a personal favorite, because it so satisfies the naturalist in me).

And so, what has led us in the wrong direction? What limits scientific practice and thought?

Politics, fragmentation and self-isolation. Read the rest of this entry »

By Liam Scheff
Salvo Magazine – Summer 2006

Here are three ideas that you will never see debated by the major media:

• Was a bird-flu pandemic ever really likely?
• Is AIDS in fact a sexually transmitted disease?
• Does current evolutionary theory truly explain the diversity of life on earth?

Each of these widely-promoted beliefs is contradicted by more competing evidence than you can shake a stick at (from wide and varied sources), but you’ll never hear about it from the major outlets for science news – the New York Times, PBS, NPR, the BBC, or CNN – because the media simply doesn’t question the received scientific wisdom.

Because the major media doesn’t do science journalism the way it reports news.

When watch the news, we expect to hear crossfire and flak. We’re not flustered by divergent takes on policy. We feel that government business should be aired and battled over in the public sphere. We expect policy-makers and government officials to regularly submit to hard questions from the press, and to take the hot seat on the news shows.
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