I recommend reading “The Story of the Earth” by Robert Hazen if you’re interested in really, REALLY ancient history.
Thanks, that was interesting. Just shows you how much has changed since I was in school in the 60’s.
The Cambrian explosion has always presented a major stumbling block to standard Darwinian evolution as the fossil record showed no simpler precursor forms. This Avalon explosion removes that, but also just pushes the same question back about 50 million years. Again, where are the much simpler and linear precursors? Maybe they will be found if we just wait long enough; who knows? I’ve read several books on the subject and such an intense and relativity quick explosion of diversity just doesn’t fit in with standard Darwinian evolution.
Now, of course, we do see Darwinian evolution at work even now with the Covid virus and antibiotic resistant bacteria, and also in more recent fossil evolution….consider the development of the birds from dinosaurs.
I think it would be an exciting time to be an evolutionary biologist to try and reconcile recent and evidentiary Darwinian evolution with the apparent contradictory evidence of intense, rapid diversification at the beginning of life. This is a situation physicists love, but from my talks with the biologists I know, they seem to be stuck on Darwin and don’t really want to consider that they may need to make some major modifications to their pet theory
I’d certainly like to hear from some biologists here on their view.
Speaking of glacial rates of evolution, one may now well understand why Pfizer claims it “needs” 55 years to release its vaccination data:
“Over 42,000 Adverse Reaction Reports Revealed In First Batch Of Pfizer Vax Docs” https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/over-42000-adverse-reaction-reports-revealed-first-batch-pfizer-vax-docs
Key grafs:
“The FDA’s excruciatingly slow release of data related to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine has already borne fruit, and it’s damning despite a trickle of just 500 pages per month out of 329,000 pages – which will take until 2076 to complete.
“As first reported by Kyle Becker, there were a total of 42,086 case reports for adverse reactions (25,379 medically confirmed, 16,707 non-medically confirmed), spanning 158,893 total events.
“More than 25,000 of the events were classified as “Nervous system disorders….”
Barry Meislin:
The data means nothing without comparing it to the rates of the same problems in the population under ordinary circumstances. If you vaccinate 50 million people, for example, at some point after that many people will have physical and mental complaints, die, etc. That doesn’t mean the shot causes what happens later, unless the mumber of such events are greater than usual in the vaccinated group, corrected for age and prior health status (vaccinated populations are older and sicker than average to begin with). People are told to report just about everything that happens to them post-vac.
The ace up “Biden”‘s sleeve?
The reason why Garland is “permitting” Durham to continue to merrily row his investigative boat?
Too many crises out there. Time for another (fatal?) distraction?
Time to re-ignite the country?…
…which apparently hasn’t been damaged sufficiently already….
I guess the “good” news here is that occasionally, “Biden” is capable of loyalty…
physicsguy:
I’m not a biologist, but I’d like to suggest a look at the theory of “punctuated equilibrium” proposed, in 1972, by paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge. This theory is far from obscure, so I can’t explain why your colleagues, from the Biology Department, neglected to talk with you about it. Or have you already dismissed this theory?
Of course, when we’re restricted to evidence from more than 600 million years ago, we’re also faced with intractable preservation problems. This is obviously even more true for organisms without bones or shells. Nothing can be done about that, so a certain amount of mystery will always be attached to life’s origin and its early evolution.
Cornflour, I’m very familiar with Gould’s PE idea. From what I’ve read on both sides of the Darwin debate is that it has fallen by the wayside.
Also, to your other point, there is apparently good microscopic fossil from earlier times up to the Avalon/Cambrian explosions which is the real problem…no intermediate forms. Just a jump from bacteria like life to complex forms.
Timely…because it’s still going on (as the MSCM struggle to wriggle off the hook by downplaying the essence and importance of the Steele Dossier by insisting that even if that dossier is total and utter fiction it DOESN’T MEAN that Trump wasn’t an agent of Russian influence, etc., etc.).
“…Time for another…distraction?…”
Those distractions are coming fast and furious….
Julie Kelly:
“If you need any proof that we are hitting a nerve about the death of Rosanne Boyland, look no further than this despicable hit job on her.
“They know what’s coming—that police either contributed or caused her death and DC coroner covered it up.” https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1467179331910877197 https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1467180056623878145
Key graf:
“The truth is coming so they’re trying to “Ashli Babbitt” her, insist she deserved what happened bc of her political beliefs.”
(Someone must be getting worried.)
+ Bonus:
The man standing next to Rosanne Boyland stating in an interview that he thought he too was going to die: https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1467202063251693582
Key graf:
“…He says NYT, WashPo photogs were there, watched it happening, and pointed their cameras down so as to not cover police violence.”
(The Corrupt Media just doing their self-appointed job…)
As a layman I’ve followed evolution and the Cambrian Explosion for years now. Fascinating stuff.
I can’t deny that something like evolution has happened but I’m not satisfied with the mechanism. I come at it as a programmer. I try to imagine Windows 10 emerging from throwing random bytes together with a reasonable form of natural selection. A few billion years just doesn’t seem like enough time for Windows 10, much less creatures as sophisticated as ourselves.
Of course, that’s just my limited gut sense. However, more capable minds than mine have taken a shot at putting numbers to such feelings. David Gelernter, a professor of Computer Science at Cornell, found these arguments persuasive:
______________________________
Do the numbers balance out? Is Neo-Darwinian evolution plausible after all? [Douglas] Axe reasoned as follows. Consider the whole history of living things—the entire group of every living organism ever. It is dominated numerically by bacteria. All other organisms, from tangerine trees to coral polyps, are only a footnote. Suppose, then, that every bacterium that has ever lived contributes one mutation before its demise to the history of life. This is a generous assumption; most bacteria pass on their genetic information unchanged, unmutated. Mutations are the exception. In any case, there have evidently been, in the whole history of life, around 1040 bacteria—yielding around 1040 mutations under Axe’s assumptions. That is a very large number of chances at any game. But given that the odds each time are 1 to 1077 against, it is not large enough. The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 1040x(1/1077)—1040 tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 1077—which equals 1 in 1037. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. Darwin loses.
I’ve followed the orthodox responses to these arguments, which mostly strike me as nitpicking over the odds or the time scales involved. It still seems to me that the Neo-Darwinist explanation is missing some big important pieces to balance those odds. But it’s wickedly complex stuff, so I don’t claim to know.
Scathing, comprehensive “post-mortem” on Russiagate…though I hope the author is wrong by saying that Russiagate is “dead” (i.e., I hope it will continue to be revealed and investigated so that ALL THE MALEFACTORS who planned it, participated in it and contributed to it are EXPOSED AND, one hopes, PROSECUTED to the full extent of the law—though I may have misunderstood what the author meant by “dead” here—perhaps he means that the scandal is totally understood for the scandal it is; except that I’m not sure he’s right about this if it’s in fact what he means…). https://www.zerohedge.com/political/obituary-russiagate
Lots of key grafs (IOW, RTWT):
“… Russiagate has plunged us into Alice–in–Wonderland depths where what is up is down, what is dark is light, what is true is to be buried, what is false is to be held high — where blindness is preferred to sight.
“This leads us to the essential question we now face, or one of them. What are the consequences of the Russiagate scam? If it rested on lies start-to-finish, this is not to say it did not exact its price. It did. The price is high, and we are fated to pay it for some time to come…
“…To understand this condition, we must recognize it as the work of a diabolic alliance comprised of the Democratic Party’s corrupt leadership, the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies, the national security apparatus and its many appendages, and the media. It is no longer in the slightest objectionable to speak or write of a Deep State that controls this country.
“The elite minority this alliance represents derives its power from its claim to speak for the majority — an absolutely classic case of the ‘soft despotism’ Alexis de Tocqueville warned Americans of 190 years ago. Liberal authoritarianism is another name for what has consolidated itself in the years since Democrats, in mid–2016, first raised the phony specter of Russia ‘hacking’ into its mail systems.
“In effect, Russiagate has tipped the American polity upside down. It is the illiberal liberals among us, righteous as the old Puritan ministers of New England, who now prosecute a regime of censorship and suppression of dissent that is at least as severe and anti-democratic as what conservatives had going during the Cold War (and in my view worse)…
“…The damage Russiagate has done to the press … let me rephrase this. The damage the press has inflicted upon itself in the cause of Russiagate is so extensive it is hard to calculate with any precision. We watch now as their credibility collapses in real time. Those running the mainstream newspapers and networks seem to understand this, as they rush to protect what remains of their reputations with rearguard actions to obscure their grossly irresponsible conduct….”
The Hunter Games (continued)….
“On Nov 2, 2015, the director of Burisma’s board wrote Hunter demanding ‘deliverables’, specifically to close down investigations of Burisma.
“20 days later, that ‘deliverable’ had somehow made its way into Joe Biden’s Ukraine demands….” https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/1467244993270145025
Nick Lane has some books for intelligent laypersons that are reasonably up to date. It’s pretty ancient: origin of Life and the quite complex puzzle of origin of eukaryotes. The latter being possibly a tougher nut of the two.
They’ve made big progress since I read in this area 20 years ago.
IIRC, I read a book by Hazen and was offput by his (to me, gratuitous) advocacy of global warming.
“I’ve followed the orthodox responses to these arguments, which mostly strike me as nitpicking over the odds or the time scales involved. It still seems to me that the Neo-Darwinist explanation is missing some big important pieces to balance those odds.”
I know this thread is dying, but Huxley you’ve hit the nail on the head. From my conversations with biologists they don’t view such disconnect as an opportunity for knowledge advancement, but as an attack on their Holy Grail of Darwin evolution. It may all go back to an emotional reaction to the Scopes trial; many biologists get their back up at any religious person as they suspect that person is going after Darwin and are thus “anti-science”. Any criticism of Darwin then becomes an attack on science in general, and the person making the criticism must be some sort of evangelical fundamentalist.
I keep thinking back to the quantum revolution of, (gad!) almost a hundred years ago. Sure, there were some physicists who staunchly defended the classical view, but most were enthralled that some seriously new knowledge was emerging. In many ways I admire biologists trying to tackle what physicists see as a very complex system, and as a result they have to focus on understandable small subsystems. But, as a result they often lose the entire forest for the small underbrush. Darwin was successful because he could see a broader picture. Biology needs another such person, to not discard Darwin all together, but find a modification to bring it in line with the actual data.
Of course, the article could be entirely wrong, timing wise….or just wrong, period.
OTOH, this may be precisely what we are seeing, currently.
(To be sure, Operation Barbarossa was also “planned to perfection”—though it started several weeks to a month later than it should have all thanks to Il Duce’s decision to invade Albania—according to one analysis—which means, if this particular analysis is correct, that the Allied Countries owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Mussolini…. So how do you say “irony” in Italian?…)
WRT evolution, if physicist have trouble reconciling/integrating wave theory and quantum theory, why can’t biologists deal with two (or more) irreconcilable—or seemingly contradictory—theories.
(IOW, what if the holy grail of evolution, like that of GUT is a chimera? Of course, the answer’s JUST GOT TO BE OUT THERE somewhere, but where…and when…?)
Still reading this thread with interest. If “evolution” means Darwin’s theory, they’re cooked. As physicsguy says, time to open minds and investigate. Data has to be dealt with. The same is true with climate theory.
Kate, I wouldn’t say Darwin is cooked. I think Darwin’s formulation is more like Newton; ie worked/works fairly well and really advanced the field of biology, but definitely not the final word. Newton was modified by Relativity (both special and general) and by QM. At low speeds, wrt to light, and in the more macroscopic realm Newton works great. No civil, mechanical, aeronautical, etc, engineer needs QM or Relativity; though nowadays most electrical engineers definitely need QM unless designing power grids. I suspect a similar situation with Darwin.
He is wrong that science evolves, we know now it is written in stone as soon as it is made, and if you disagree your a idiot.
( actually that was a awesome video)
Well, physicsguy, microevolution is definitely observable. The question of whether this process can actually produce entirely new species, not just modifications, is what they’re talking about, as I gather it. And Gelertner’s discussion of the probabilities of this happening even once, much less routinely, is interesting.
By the way, my physicist friend has not responded to links to Lindzen and Judith Curry. I am afraid she’s too far gone; knows her own field intimately, defers to “authority” in other fields without investigation, and is a confirmed leftist politically. My physics guy husband is really disillusioned by this.
“The question of whether this process can actually produce entirely new species, not just modifications, is what they’re talking about, as I gather it.”
Exactly! Which is why the explosions represent such a distinct problem for Darwinian evolution. Supporters say DE can bring new species given proper time, but the explosions tend to dispute that idea given their very short time line.
Sorry to hear about your friend, you can send her my tract if you think it will do any good, but if she won’t even look at Lindzen then probably a waste.
Yes, that’s what I think, physicsguy. We’ll stay in touch with her on the annual Christmas letter and personal basis, and leave both politics and religion out of it.
Huxley,
Perhaps I’m being stupid here or there is something else about the math that I don’t understand but “1040x(1/1077)” equals 0.9656453… which would point to a good probability of at least one successful mutation.
I guess I’m going to have to read the piece to see what I’m missing.
Never mind I now see that the “40” and the “77” were exponents of 10 and that changes everything.
physicsguy, JimNorCal, Kate:
As JimNorCal mentions, the evolution of eukaryotes (cells with enclosed nuclei) is problematic for straight Neo-Darwinism (Darwin + Mendel). Likely impossible. The now orthodox solution is Lynn Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory (1966) in which eukaryotes evolved from a symbiotic combination of more primitive bacteria, not Darwinian mutation/natural selection.
Even though Margulis’s solution only augmented Darwinism, it was still considered an attack and Margulis was considered a heretic. Her tenacity was eventually rewarded in one of those great “Rebel Scientist Upsets the Orthodox Applecart and Wins” stories.
(I wonder how many of those stories are still possible with today’s scientific establishment.)
My point is that straight Neo-Darwinism has already been shown inadequate to explain a major, major feature of life’s evolution, though Neo-Darwinists in Margulis’s day stuck to their guns that it was a gap that their orthodoxy would explain in time, just as they do today with other inconvenient gaps like the Cambrian Explosion.
Any criticism of Darwin then becomes an attack on science in general, and the person making the criticism must be some sort of evangelical fundamentalist.
physcisguy:
Quite so.
This is science as a religion in combat with other religions. I get it to a point. Scientists had to fight hard to break the hold of religious orthodoxy over their work.
But setting up a counter-religion, whose tenets, such as evolution, are not open to debate, is not a scientific solution. It’s a Planet of the Apes solution.
“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.”
M. Muggeridge.
It is the illiberal liberals among us, righteous as the old Puritan ministers of New England, who now prosecute a regime of censorship and suppression of dissent that is at least as severe and anti-democratic as what conservatives had going during the Cold War (and in my view worse)…
What did conservatives do during the Cold War that was so awful? “McCarthyism”? Weren’t most of the people he accused (like BLM/Antifa today) allied with those dedicated to burying the Historic American Nation?
huxley, I commend the Nick Lane books to you. He also has a couple of YouTubes and “The Vital Question” addresses these questions from the viewpoint of circa 2015.
Available from many public libraries at no cost LOL
For a look at just how corrupt and incompetent climate “science” is, do a dig into the polar bear study by Monnett. One day out of 15 years he worked there, he saw some white things in the water while flying. Decided they were drowned polar bears although he knew of no examples of polar bears drowning (polar bears can swim over 400 miles over open ocean) and never examined the white things. Seriously, his only scientific observation was noting four things in the water while flying overhead.
He speculated they had drowned because he’d read an article that argued that storms will be worse in the future and the area had experienced a storm the week before. And this is why the EPA has the power to regulate every activity that releases carbon dioxide.
So far, we are still allowed to exhale.
My other concern with evolution is the origin of life. Darwinists solve it by saying it’s not their problem. They only swing into action after life, in all its DNA glory, appears.
However, for those spoilsports who want a scientific accounting of life on this planet, a theory of how DNA “evolved” from chemical compounds on ancient Earth would be nice. The embarrassing problem is that scientists really don’t know and mostly wave their hands a lot about clays and oceanic vents and the Miller-Urey experiments.
My problem, again as a programmer, is that DNA is not just a complicated chemical for life, it is essentially a computer program using amino acids as its basic instructions, which when the program is run, generates the cells for everything from amoebas to human beings.
Imagine the sophistication of such a system, then consider that it had to evolve in a semi-random way from basic chemicals on the early Earth. OMG.
Given the hot chaotic state of the planet in those days, this had to happen relatively fast before the earliest life emerged. At first the time window for life seemed to be short — a few hundred million years. Now I read life may have had several hundred millions of years.
Which doesn’t resolve my concern. It still seems too short, unless we can find some emergent property of such chemicals which drives them towards DNA on a planet like early Earth.
For this reason I’m attracted to panspermia — the theory life emerged somewhere else, arrived on Earth and began life on our planet. The standard reply is that panspermia doesn’t answer the question of life, it just kicks the can somewhere else. However, that’s fine with me because it buys time for DNA to evolve.
Here’s an article which addresses my concern directly and uses computer science to estimate how long it would take the earth life to evolve:
________________________________
A new study co-authored by a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health concludes that life originated elsewhere in the Universe around 9.8 billion years ago – roughly five-billion years before the Earth was even formed.
This hardly settles the issue. There are a good many questionable assumptions in this study. But it is a good faith attempt to quantify the complexity of life and the time necessary for it to evolve.
JimNorCal:
Any particular reasons I should read Nick Lane? My dance card for books is pretty full.
I was surprised when I checked him out on wiki. He looks like a cleaned-up version of Grigori Perelman, the mathematician who did the breaktrhough proof of the Poincare Conjecture, whom I was looking up for other reasons today.
Wesson,
Yes, I also noticed that “hiccup” in what I think is, overall, a very solid piece.
I suspect the author felt he had to “throw a bone” to liberal readers and head off any expected “whataboutery” at the pass (so to speak). He does say that he considers the current anti-liberalism of the Left to be “far worse” than what has been labeled “McCarthyism” (IOW the CURRENT Leftist “McCarthyism” is “far worse” than the original flavor).
On the other hand, even though the Communist threat was real in the 40s and 50s (as has become even clearer over the past several decades), there are those who honestly believed at the time, and continue to believe, that the HUAC exaggerated and even crossed the line in its pursuit of sympathizers if not “fellow travelers”. Perhaps the author may be one of those who think so.
huxley:
A while back I was listening to some scientist who’s also a believer. He pointed out that DNA is code, and code always is the product of mind.
Food for thought.
Careful Neo, you are slipping towards ID 😉 Just kidding.
I think you’re referring to Stephen Meyer.He wrote the very good book, “Doubting Darwin” where he lays out some very devastating arguments against classical evolution. And to Huxley’s point about DNA being a code, he also shows that seems very improbable to appear from chemical evolution given even longer time constraints. His solution is to say all the issues go away if one brings in intelligent design. My problem with his approach is that he gets the scientific logic a bit backwards. It’s fine to posit a hypothesis to explain problems seen in the data. However, you can’t then claim the problems in the data ARE the experimental support of the hypothesis. The hypothesis must provide NEW predictions which can then be tested. That he doesn’t do.
Personal opinion: I not quite ready to bring in ID; I’d rather attempt to exhaust all possible physical explanations first, even if we haven’t thought of them yet. Though I have to admit a nagging question for me for many years is the role “consciousness” (whatever that is) seems to play in the measurement problem in QM. How does that play into evolution? But that is whole ‘nother long Open Thread 🙂
I am not a scientist, a mathematician, or a coder.
Your problems resolve, however, if you accept the Hebrew (and following, Christian) concept of a Creator who exists outside of his creation and who made all that exists. This leaves us examining how he did it. Rather than kicking the can down the road by thinking life came from some other place, why not face the question head-on?
A while back I was listening to some scientist who’s also a believer. He pointed out that DNA is code, and code always is the product of mind.
neo, physicsguy, Kate:
Well, that’s a problem and scientists will fight like hell not to take that step.
Correctly, I think. Not multiplying entities beyond necessity, as Occam advised.
However, I would like to see more honesty and humility from scientists. There are problems with evolution, which ought not be waved off contemptuously as gaps which will inevitably be filled in time, so shut up already.
Evolution is not the only hint that there is something spooky about living on a planet with intelligent life. Back in the 2000s I was keen on the Anthropic Principle and the notion of the Finely Tuned Universe.
_________________________
The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. … The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.
–Stephen Hawking
_________________________
For a while this looked like a shockingly strong argument for god-like intelligence behind the universe. I read John Polkinghorne’s “Belief in God in an Age of Science,” and it bowled me over. Polkinghorne is a theoretical physicist turned theologian, so he speaks physics and lays it out with authority that the odds are overwhelmingly huge that we live in a universe that allow life by accident.
But if it’s not by accident, how?
Physicists didn’t have ready answers to explain the appearance of Intelligent Design. Then, as String Theory became more influential, they found a loophole with Multiple Universes.
In String Theory the physical constants are arbitrary. For every possible set of constants there exists a universe. By definition we can only live in a universe which looks fine-tuned for us. So problem solved!
Though not entirely. Critics of this approach point out that believing in multiple universes, for which we have no evidence as yet, is as big a leap of faith as believing in God.
Bigger, in my opinion, huxley, but that’s me.
There are problems with evolution, which ought not be waved off …
Yes, and chiefest among them ( in a social sense) as has long been noted, is the term “Evolution” itself, freighted as it has been from early days with philosophical and value conveying senses. These are senses which if stripped away, strip away also at least some of the unjustified emotion that seems to be attached to the various questions.
A number of good books cover this. Gilson’s old classic “From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey In Final Causality, Species, and Evolution” provides a useful and brief survey of how the notion of natural selection got entangled with notions of ascending and Cosmic Progress™.
HUAC always gets mentioned when McCarthyism is brought up but that was a House committee that ran from 1938 to 1975 and during that whole period was chaired by Republicans only for 5 years, 1947-48 and 1953 – 55.
Years ago I picked up a used copy of the Dec. 1961 HUAC “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications,” it makes for some interesting reading.
huxley “Any particular reasons I should read Nick Lane? My dance card for books is pretty full.”
Sure, just file the name away. But if you’re still talking about Urey-Miller and primordial swamp be aware that things have moved far, far beyond those days.
I like the guy because he’s up to date on the science, works hard to communicate technically challenging torrents of data and, while he’s an acolyte of Science he spends minimal time deploring people of faith.
Although I’m much more a person of faith, and although research into a totally mechanistic creation of life may ultimately be wasted effort, it appeals to me. I would not take the joy of trying to “solve the puzzle” away from them.
Barry,
Thanks for your reply. I skimmed the article and generally agreed with it. What bugged me was that he threw a bomb into his own premise with “What they did is so bad, it’s as bad as what we did 30+ years ago, maybe worse”.
False equivalence of sedition, to possibly overzealous pursuit of declared national enemies.
I don’t routinely read Zero Hedge any more. A lot of the authors are fringe-y, IMO.
But if you’re still talking about Urey-Miller and primordial swamp be aware that things have moved far, far beyond those days.”
I guess I have not been aware. If anyone had asked me I would have mumbled, “Volcanoes, primordial soup, lightning magic, RNA boom. Then jellyfish crawling up on land.” Just like the grade school diorama showed.
ZH is fascinating.
Gotta take it with a whole salt mine worth of salt, though, and keep in mind that—as far as I can tell—it tends towards contrarianism, russophilia, more than a bit of sensationalism and judeo…um, well, let’s call it judeoskepticism…. (The comments regarding the latter score can generally be counted on to be OTT…but, hey, freedom of speech….right?(?))
Yet for all that, it can be, at times, evenhanded, sober, and sane and does link to legitimate—even cutting edge—commentators and publicizes international events and curiosities.
One could call it an eclectic clearing house—or digest.
For all that, I don’t really follow the ins and outs of the economic posts, which take up a pretty large chunk of its articles and commentaries (though I figure someone must get it). It all leaves me with a kind of “sky-is-falling” feeling, which conclusion, if rinsed and repeated enough times, might, I suppose, even happen.
That is, if I were to believe everything I read there—on economics and finance—I’d get out of the market NOW and invest in gold, but since I’m not IN the market and don’t have any gold (aside from a few tooth fillings), I’m not terribly affected by that, at least. But a financial disaster will of course have repercussions for almost everyone.
Short version: It’s entertaining and informative in a broad, eclectic way, but… “caveat emptor” big-time (as in most things, I guess).
While we’re at it, item #17000 in the file marked “higher ed administrators are smarmy microbes”
And in Finland, a clergyman is being prosecuted for preaching against homosexuality.
And you and I both know that the phonies who run organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House will notice none of this.
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
Cool! Looks like a very interesting channel.
I recommend reading “The Story of the Earth” by Robert Hazen if you’re interested in really, REALLY ancient history.
Thanks, that was interesting. Just shows you how much has changed since I was in school in the 60’s.
The Cambrian explosion has always presented a major stumbling block to standard Darwinian evolution as the fossil record showed no simpler precursor forms. This Avalon explosion removes that, but also just pushes the same question back about 50 million years. Again, where are the much simpler and linear precursors? Maybe they will be found if we just wait long enough; who knows? I’ve read several books on the subject and such an intense and relativity quick explosion of diversity just doesn’t fit in with standard Darwinian evolution.
Now, of course, we do see Darwinian evolution at work even now with the Covid virus and antibiotic resistant bacteria, and also in more recent fossil evolution….consider the development of the birds from dinosaurs.
I think it would be an exciting time to be an evolutionary biologist to try and reconcile recent and evidentiary Darwinian evolution with the apparent contradictory evidence of intense, rapid diversification at the beginning of life. This is a situation physicists love, but from my talks with the biologists I know, they seem to be stuck on Darwin and don’t really want to consider that they may need to make some major modifications to their pet theory
I’d certainly like to hear from some biologists here on their view.
Durham’s investigation continues to evolve…slowly but steadily:
“Special Counsel Durham Found The E-Mails Fusion GPS Tried To Hide”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/special-counsel-durham-found-e-mails-fusion-gps-tried-hide
Speaking of glacial rates of evolution, one may now well understand why Pfizer claims it “needs” 55 years to release its vaccination data:
“Over 42,000 Adverse Reaction Reports Revealed In First Batch Of Pfizer Vax Docs”
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/over-42000-adverse-reaction-reports-revealed-first-batch-pfizer-vax-docs
Key grafs:
“The FDA’s excruciatingly slow release of data related to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine has already borne fruit, and it’s damning despite a trickle of just 500 pages per month out of 329,000 pages – which will take until 2076 to complete.
“As first reported by Kyle Becker, there were a total of 42,086 case reports for adverse reactions (25,379 medically confirmed, 16,707 non-medically confirmed), spanning 158,893 total events.
“More than 25,000 of the events were classified as “Nervous system disorders….”
Barry Meislin:
The data means nothing without comparing it to the rates of the same problems in the population under ordinary circumstances. If you vaccinate 50 million people, for example, at some point after that many people will have physical and mental complaints, die, etc. That doesn’t mean the shot causes what happens later, unless the mumber of such events are greater than usual in the vaccinated group, corrected for age and prior health status (vaccinated populations are older and sicker than average to begin with). People are told to report just about everything that happens to them post-vac.
The Empire Strikes Back:
“Justice Department tells court ‘Alternative Mueller Report’ found and may soon be released”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/justice-department-tells-court-alternative-mueller-report-found-and-may-soon-be-released
H/T Powerline blog.
The ace up “Biden”‘s sleeve?
The reason why Garland is “permitting” Durham to continue to merrily row his investigative boat?
Too many crises out there. Time for another (fatal?) distraction?
Time to re-ignite the country?…
…which apparently hasn’t been damaged sufficiently already….
The reason, if one were necessary, why “Biden” has—pace Psaki—no plans to fire Il Fauci:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/03/president-fauci-rules/
H/T Powerline blog.
I guess the “good” news here is that occasionally, “Biden” is capable of loyalty…
physicsguy:
I’m not a biologist, but I’d like to suggest a look at the theory of “punctuated equilibrium” proposed, in 1972, by paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge. This theory is far from obscure, so I can’t explain why your colleagues, from the Biology Department, neglected to talk with you about it. Or have you already dismissed this theory?
Of course, when we’re restricted to evidence from more than 600 million years ago, we’re also faced with intractable preservation problems. This is obviously even more true for organisms without bones or shells. Nothing can be done about that, so a certain amount of mystery will always be attached to life’s origin and its early evolution.
Cornflour, I’m very familiar with Gould’s PE idea. From what I’ve read on both sides of the Darwin debate is that it has fallen by the wayside.
Also, to your other point, there is apparently good microscopic fossil from earlier times up to the Avalon/Cambrian explosions which is the real problem…no intermediate forms. Just a jump from bacteria like life to complex forms.
EVERYTHING you wanted to know about Mainstream Corrupt Media subversion, collusion and participation in the Russiagate scandal…but were afraid to ask:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/limited-hangout-lee-smith
Timely…because it’s still going on (as the MSCM struggle to wriggle off the hook by downplaying the essence and importance of the Steele Dossier by insisting that even if that dossier is total and utter fiction it DOESN’T MEAN that Trump wasn’t an agent of Russian influence, etc., etc.).
“…Time for another…distraction?…”
Those distractions are coming fast and furious….
Julie Kelly:
“If you need any proof that we are hitting a nerve about the death of Rosanne Boyland, look no further than this despicable hit job on her.
“They know what’s coming—that police either contributed or caused her death and DC coroner covered it up.”
https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1467179331910877197
https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1467180056623878145
Key graf:
“The truth is coming so they’re trying to “Ashli Babbitt” her, insist she deserved what happened bc of her political beliefs.”
(Someone must be getting worried.)
+ Bonus:
The man standing next to Rosanne Boyland stating in an interview that he thought he too was going to die:
https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1467202063251693582
Key graf:
“…He says NYT, WashPo photogs were there, watched it happening, and pointed their cameras down so as to not cover police violence.”
(The Corrupt Media just doing their self-appointed job…)
Fascinating interview with Dr. McCullough on the robustness and durability of natural immunity to Covid-19 (countering Il Fauci’s claims):
https://rumble.com/vq1n1i-natural-immunity-is-robust-complete-and-durable.html
Chris Cuomo fired! https://nypost.com/2021/12/04/chris-cuomo-fired-from-cnn-over-involvement-with-brother-andrews-scandals/
physicsguy:
As a layman I’ve followed evolution and the Cambrian Explosion for years now. Fascinating stuff.
I can’t deny that something like evolution has happened but I’m not satisfied with the mechanism. I come at it as a programmer. I try to imagine Windows 10 emerging from throwing random bytes together with a reasonable form of natural selection. A few billion years just doesn’t seem like enough time for Windows 10, much less creatures as sophisticated as ourselves.
Of course, that’s just my limited gut sense. However, more capable minds than mine have taken a shot at putting numbers to such feelings. David Gelernter, a professor of Computer Science at Cornell, found these arguments persuasive:
______________________________
Do the numbers balance out? Is Neo-Darwinian evolution plausible after all? [Douglas] Axe reasoned as follows. Consider the whole history of living things—the entire group of every living organism ever. It is dominated numerically by bacteria. All other organisms, from tangerine trees to coral polyps, are only a footnote. Suppose, then, that every bacterium that has ever lived contributes one mutation before its demise to the history of life. This is a generous assumption; most bacteria pass on their genetic information unchanged, unmutated. Mutations are the exception. In any case, there have evidently been, in the whole history of life, around 1040 bacteria—yielding around 1040 mutations under Axe’s assumptions. That is a very large number of chances at any game. But given that the odds each time are 1 to 1077 against, it is not large enough. The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 1040x(1/1077)—1040 tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 1077—which equals 1 in 1037. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. Darwin loses.
–David Gelernter, “Giving Up Darwin”
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin/
______________________________
I’ve followed the orthodox responses to these arguments, which mostly strike me as nitpicking over the odds or the time scales involved. It still seems to me that the Neo-Darwinist explanation is missing some big important pieces to balance those odds. But it’s wickedly complex stuff, so I don’t claim to know.
Scathing, comprehensive “post-mortem” on Russiagate…though I hope the author is wrong by saying that Russiagate is “dead” (i.e., I hope it will continue to be revealed and investigated so that ALL THE MALEFACTORS who planned it, participated in it and contributed to it are EXPOSED AND, one hopes, PROSECUTED to the full extent of the law—though I may have misunderstood what the author meant by “dead” here—perhaps he means that the scandal is totally understood for the scandal it is; except that I’m not sure he’s right about this if it’s in fact what he means…).
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/obituary-russiagate
Lots of key grafs (IOW, RTWT):
“… Russiagate has plunged us into Alice–in–Wonderland depths where what is up is down, what is dark is light, what is true is to be buried, what is false is to be held high — where blindness is preferred to sight.
“This leads us to the essential question we now face, or one of them. What are the consequences of the Russiagate scam? If it rested on lies start-to-finish, this is not to say it did not exact its price. It did. The price is high, and we are fated to pay it for some time to come…
“…To understand this condition, we must recognize it as the work of a diabolic alliance comprised of the Democratic Party’s corrupt leadership, the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies, the national security apparatus and its many appendages, and the media. It is no longer in the slightest objectionable to speak or write of a Deep State that controls this country.
“The elite minority this alliance represents derives its power from its claim to speak for the majority — an absolutely classic case of the ‘soft despotism’ Alexis de Tocqueville warned Americans of 190 years ago. Liberal authoritarianism is another name for what has consolidated itself in the years since Democrats, in mid–2016, first raised the phony specter of Russia ‘hacking’ into its mail systems.
“In effect, Russiagate has tipped the American polity upside down. It is the illiberal liberals among us, righteous as the old Puritan ministers of New England, who now prosecute a regime of censorship and suppression of dissent that is at least as severe and anti-democratic as what conservatives had going during the Cold War (and in my view worse)…
“…The damage Russiagate has done to the press … let me rephrase this. The damage the press has inflicted upon itself in the cause of Russiagate is so extensive it is hard to calculate with any precision. We watch now as their credibility collapses in real time. Those running the mainstream newspapers and networks seem to understand this, as they rush to protect what remains of their reputations with rearguard actions to obscure their grossly irresponsible conduct….”
Evolution of the spirit: An article on death and the acquisition of spirituality and healing that will resonate for some…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-10245979/As-husbands-life-slipped-away-felt-presence-room.html
The Hunter Games (continued)….
“On Nov 2, 2015, the director of Burisma’s board wrote Hunter demanding ‘deliverables’, specifically to close down investigations of Burisma.
“20 days later, that ‘deliverable’ had somehow made its way into Joe Biden’s Ukraine demands….”
https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/1467244993270145025
+
“‘Laptop from Hell’ author: Biden lied about not knowing of ‘Hunter’s overseas business dealings”:
https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/laptop-hell-author-biden-lied-about-not-knowing-hunters-overseas-business
Key graf:
“I think all you need to know about Burisma is that when Joe Biden stopped being vice president, Burisma cut Hunter Biden’s salary in half…”
Nick Lane has some books for intelligent laypersons that are reasonably up to date. It’s pretty ancient: origin of Life and the quite complex puzzle of origin of eukaryotes. The latter being possibly a tougher nut of the two.
They’ve made big progress since I read in this area 20 years ago.
IIRC, I read a book by Hazen and was offput by his (to me, gratuitous) advocacy of global warming.
“I’ve followed the orthodox responses to these arguments, which mostly strike me as nitpicking over the odds or the time scales involved. It still seems to me that the Neo-Darwinist explanation is missing some big important pieces to balance those odds.”
I know this thread is dying, but Huxley you’ve hit the nail on the head. From my conversations with biologists they don’t view such disconnect as an opportunity for knowledge advancement, but as an attack on their Holy Grail of Darwin evolution. It may all go back to an emotional reaction to the Scopes trial; many biologists get their back up at any religious person as they suspect that person is going after Darwin and are thus “anti-science”. Any criticism of Darwin then becomes an attack on science in general, and the person making the criticism must be some sort of evangelical fundamentalist.
I keep thinking back to the quantum revolution of, (gad!) almost a hundred years ago. Sure, there were some physicists who staunchly defended the classical view, but most were enthralled that some seriously new knowledge was emerging. In many ways I admire biologists trying to tackle what physicists see as a very complex system, and as a result they have to focus on understandable small subsystems. But, as a result they often lose the entire forest for the small underbrush. Darwin was successful because he could see a broader picture. Biology needs another such person, to not discard Darwin all together, but find a modification to bring it in line with the actual data.
Looks like the international elites are going to have to put on a global “full court press”—and soon—if they expect to achieve their ultimate goal, since according to the following the window is closing quickly.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/now-or-never-great-transition-must-be-imposed
Of course, the article could be entirely wrong, timing wise….or just wrong, period.
OTOH, this may be precisely what we are seeing, currently.
(To be sure, Operation Barbarossa was also “planned to perfection”—though it started several weeks to a month later than it should have all thanks to Il Duce’s decision to invade Albania—according to one analysis—which means, if this particular analysis is correct, that the Allied Countries owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Mussolini…. So how do you say “irony” in Italian?…)
WRT evolution, if physicist have trouble reconciling/integrating wave theory and quantum theory, why can’t biologists deal with two (or more) irreconcilable—or seemingly contradictory—theories.
(IOW, what if the holy grail of evolution, like that of GUT is a chimera? Of course, the answer’s JUST GOT TO BE OUT THERE somewhere, but where…and when…?)
Still reading this thread with interest. If “evolution” means Darwin’s theory, they’re cooked. As physicsguy says, time to open minds and investigate. Data has to be dealt with. The same is true with climate theory.
Kate, I wouldn’t say Darwin is cooked. I think Darwin’s formulation is more like Newton; ie worked/works fairly well and really advanced the field of biology, but definitely not the final word. Newton was modified by Relativity (both special and general) and by QM. At low speeds, wrt to light, and in the more macroscopic realm Newton works great. No civil, mechanical, aeronautical, etc, engineer needs QM or Relativity; though nowadays most electrical engineers definitely need QM unless designing power grids. I suspect a similar situation with Darwin.
He is wrong that science evolves, we know now it is written in stone as soon as it is made, and if you disagree your a idiot.
( actually that was a awesome video)
Well, physicsguy, microevolution is definitely observable. The question of whether this process can actually produce entirely new species, not just modifications, is what they’re talking about, as I gather it. And Gelertner’s discussion of the probabilities of this happening even once, much less routinely, is interesting.
By the way, my physicist friend has not responded to links to Lindzen and Judith Curry. I am afraid she’s too far gone; knows her own field intimately, defers to “authority” in other fields without investigation, and is a confirmed leftist politically. My physics guy husband is really disillusioned by this.
“The question of whether this process can actually produce entirely new species, not just modifications, is what they’re talking about, as I gather it.”
Exactly! Which is why the explosions represent such a distinct problem for Darwinian evolution. Supporters say DE can bring new species given proper time, but the explosions tend to dispute that idea given their very short time line.
Sorry to hear about your friend, you can send her my tract if you think it will do any good, but if she won’t even look at Lindzen then probably a waste.
Yes, that’s what I think, physicsguy. We’ll stay in touch with her on the annual Christmas letter and personal basis, and leave both politics and religion out of it.
Huxley,
Perhaps I’m being stupid here or there is something else about the math that I don’t understand but “1040x(1/1077)” equals 0.9656453… which would point to a good probability of at least one successful mutation.
I guess I’m going to have to read the piece to see what I’m missing.
Never mind I now see that the “40” and the “77” were exponents of 10 and that changes everything.
physicsguy, JimNorCal, Kate:
As JimNorCal mentions, the evolution of eukaryotes (cells with enclosed nuclei) is problematic for straight Neo-Darwinism (Darwin + Mendel). Likely impossible. The now orthodox solution is Lynn Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory (1966) in which eukaryotes evolved from a symbiotic combination of more primitive bacteria, not Darwinian mutation/natural selection.
Even though Margulis’s solution only augmented Darwinism, it was still considered an attack and Margulis was considered a heretic. Her tenacity was eventually rewarded in one of those great “Rebel Scientist Upsets the Orthodox Applecart and Wins” stories.
(I wonder how many of those stories are still possible with today’s scientific establishment.)
My point is that straight Neo-Darwinism has already been shown inadequate to explain a major, major feature of life’s evolution, though Neo-Darwinists in Margulis’s day stuck to their guns that it was a gap that their orthodoxy would explain in time, just as they do today with other inconvenient gaps like the Cambrian Explosion.
Any criticism of Darwin then becomes an attack on science in general, and the person making the criticism must be some sort of evangelical fundamentalist.
physcisguy:
Quite so.
This is science as a religion in combat with other religions. I get it to a point. Scientists had to fight hard to break the hold of religious orthodoxy over their work.
But setting up a counter-religion, whose tenets, such as evolution, are not open to debate, is not a scientific solution. It’s a Planet of the Apes solution.
“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.”
M. Muggeridge.
What did conservatives do during the Cold War that was so awful? “McCarthyism”? Weren’t most of the people he accused (like BLM/Antifa today) allied with those dedicated to burying the Historic American Nation?
huxley, I commend the Nick Lane books to you. He also has a couple of YouTubes and “The Vital Question” addresses these questions from the viewpoint of circa 2015.
Available from many public libraries at no cost LOL
For a look at just how corrupt and incompetent climate “science” is, do a dig into the polar bear study by Monnett. One day out of 15 years he worked there, he saw some white things in the water while flying. Decided they were drowned polar bears although he knew of no examples of polar bears drowning (polar bears can swim over 400 miles over open ocean) and never examined the white things. Seriously, his only scientific observation was noting four things in the water while flying overhead.
He speculated they had drowned because he’d read an article that argued that storms will be worse in the future and the area had experienced a storm the week before. And this is why the EPA has the power to regulate every activity that releases carbon dioxide.
So far, we are still allowed to exhale.
My other concern with evolution is the origin of life. Darwinists solve it by saying it’s not their problem. They only swing into action after life, in all its DNA glory, appears.
However, for those spoilsports who want a scientific accounting of life on this planet, a theory of how DNA “evolved” from chemical compounds on ancient Earth would be nice. The embarrassing problem is that scientists really don’t know and mostly wave their hands a lot about clays and oceanic vents and the Miller-Urey experiments.
My problem, again as a programmer, is that DNA is not just a complicated chemical for life, it is essentially a computer program using amino acids as its basic instructions, which when the program is run, generates the cells for everything from amoebas to human beings.
Imagine the sophistication of such a system, then consider that it had to evolve in a semi-random way from basic chemicals on the early Earth. OMG.
Given the hot chaotic state of the planet in those days, this had to happen relatively fast before the earliest life emerged. At first the time window for life seemed to be short — a few hundred million years. Now I read life may have had several hundred millions of years.
Which doesn’t resolve my concern. It still seems too short, unless we can find some emergent property of such chemicals which drives them towards DNA on a planet like early Earth.
For this reason I’m attracted to panspermia — the theory life emerged somewhere else, arrived on Earth and began life on our planet. The standard reply is that panspermia doesn’t answer the question of life, it just kicks the can somewhere else. However, that’s fine with me because it buys time for DNA to evolve.
Here’s an article which addresses my concern directly and uses computer science to estimate how long it would take the earth life to evolve:
________________________________
A new study co-authored by a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health concludes that life originated elsewhere in the Universe around 9.8 billion years ago – roughly five-billion years before the Earth was even formed.
https://gizmodo.com/moores-law-predicts-life-originated-billions-of-years-476129496
________________________________
This hardly settles the issue. There are a good many questionable assumptions in this study. But it is a good faith attempt to quantify the complexity of life and the time necessary for it to evolve.
JimNorCal:
Any particular reasons I should read Nick Lane? My dance card for books is pretty full.
I was surprised when I checked him out on wiki. He looks like a cleaned-up version of Grigori Perelman, the mathematician who did the breaktrhough proof of the Poincare Conjecture, whom I was looking up for other reasons today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Lane
Wesson,
Yes, I also noticed that “hiccup” in what I think is, overall, a very solid piece.
I suspect the author felt he had to “throw a bone” to liberal readers and head off any expected “whataboutery” at the pass (so to speak). He does say that he considers the current anti-liberalism of the Left to be “far worse” than what has been labeled “McCarthyism” (IOW the CURRENT Leftist “McCarthyism” is “far worse” than the original flavor).
On the other hand, even though the Communist threat was real in the 40s and 50s (as has become even clearer over the past several decades), there are those who honestly believed at the time, and continue to believe, that the HUAC exaggerated and even crossed the line in its pursuit of sympathizers if not “fellow travelers”. Perhaps the author may be one of those who think so.
huxley:
A while back I was listening to some scientist who’s also a believer. He pointed out that DNA is code, and code always is the product of mind.
Food for thought.
Careful Neo, you are slipping towards ID 😉 Just kidding.
I think you’re referring to Stephen Meyer.He wrote the very good book, “Doubting Darwin” where he lays out some very devastating arguments against classical evolution. And to Huxley’s point about DNA being a code, he also shows that seems very improbable to appear from chemical evolution given even longer time constraints. His solution is to say all the issues go away if one brings in intelligent design. My problem with his approach is that he gets the scientific logic a bit backwards. It’s fine to posit a hypothesis to explain problems seen in the data. However, you can’t then claim the problems in the data ARE the experimental support of the hypothesis. The hypothesis must provide NEW predictions which can then be tested. That he doesn’t do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY
Personal opinion: I not quite ready to bring in ID; I’d rather attempt to exhaust all possible physical explanations first, even if we haven’t thought of them yet. Though I have to admit a nagging question for me for many years is the role “consciousness” (whatever that is) seems to play in the measurement problem in QM. How does that play into evolution? But that is whole ‘nother long Open Thread 🙂
I am not a scientist, a mathematician, or a coder.
Your problems resolve, however, if you accept the Hebrew (and following, Christian) concept of a Creator who exists outside of his creation and who made all that exists. This leaves us examining how he did it. Rather than kicking the can down the road by thinking life came from some other place, why not face the question head-on?
A while back I was listening to some scientist who’s also a believer. He pointed out that DNA is code, and code always is the product of mind.
neo, physicsguy, Kate:
Well, that’s a problem and scientists will fight like hell not to take that step.
Correctly, I think. Not multiplying entities beyond necessity, as Occam advised.
However, I would like to see more honesty and humility from scientists. There are problems with evolution, which ought not be waved off contemptuously as gaps which will inevitably be filled in time, so shut up already.
Evolution is not the only hint that there is something spooky about living on a planet with intelligent life. Back in the 2000s I was keen on the Anthropic Principle and the notion of the Finely Tuned Universe.
_________________________
The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. … The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.
–Stephen Hawking
_________________________
For a while this looked like a shockingly strong argument for god-like intelligence behind the universe. I read John Polkinghorne’s “Belief in God in an Age of Science,” and it bowled me over. Polkinghorne is a theoretical physicist turned theologian, so he speaks physics and lays it out with authority that the odds are overwhelmingly huge that we live in a universe that allow life by accident.
But if it’s not by accident, how?
Physicists didn’t have ready answers to explain the appearance of Intelligent Design. Then, as String Theory became more influential, they found a loophole with Multiple Universes.
In String Theory the physical constants are arbitrary. For every possible set of constants there exists a universe. By definition we can only live in a universe which looks fine-tuned for us. So problem solved!
Though not entirely. Critics of this approach point out that believing in multiple universes, for which we have no evidence as yet, is as big a leap of faith as believing in God.
Bigger, in my opinion, huxley, but that’s me.
Yes, and chiefest among them ( in a social sense) as has long been noted, is the term “Evolution” itself, freighted as it has been from early days with philosophical and value conveying senses. These are senses which if stripped away, strip away also at least some of the unjustified emotion that seems to be attached to the various questions.
A number of good books cover this. Gilson’s old classic “From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey In Final Causality, Species, and Evolution” provides a useful and brief survey of how the notion of natural selection got entangled with notions of ascending and Cosmic Progress™.
HUAC always gets mentioned when McCarthyism is brought up but that was a House committee that ran from 1938 to 1975 and during that whole period was chaired by Republicans only for 5 years, 1947-48 and 1953 – 55.
Years ago I picked up a used copy of the Dec. 1961 HUAC “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications,” it makes for some interesting reading.
huxley “Any particular reasons I should read Nick Lane? My dance card for books is pretty full.”
Sure, just file the name away. But if you’re still talking about Urey-Miller and primordial swamp be aware that things have moved far, far beyond those days.
I like the guy because he’s up to date on the science, works hard to communicate technically challenging torrents of data and, while he’s an acolyte of Science he spends minimal time deploring people of faith.
Although I’m much more a person of faith, and although research into a totally mechanistic creation of life may ultimately be wasted effort, it appeals to me. I would not take the joy of trying to “solve the puzzle” away from them.
Barry,
Thanks for your reply. I skimmed the article and generally agreed with it. What bugged me was that he threw a bomb into his own premise with “What they did is so bad, it’s as bad as what we did 30+ years ago, maybe worse”.
False equivalence of sedition, to possibly overzealous pursuit of declared national enemies.
I don’t routinely read Zero Hedge any more. A lot of the authors are fringe-y, IMO.
I guess I have not been aware. If anyone had asked me I would have mumbled, “Volcanoes, primordial soup, lightning magic, RNA boom. Then jellyfish crawling up on land.” Just like the grade school diorama showed.
ZH is fascinating.
Gotta take it with a whole salt mine worth of salt, though, and keep in mind that—as far as I can tell—it tends towards contrarianism, russophilia, more than a bit of sensationalism and judeo…um, well, let’s call it judeoskepticism…. (The comments regarding the latter score can generally be counted on to be OTT…but, hey, freedom of speech….right?(?))
Yet for all that, it can be, at times, evenhanded, sober, and sane and does link to legitimate—even cutting edge—commentators and publicizes international events and curiosities.
One could call it an eclectic clearing house—or digest.
For all that, I don’t really follow the ins and outs of the economic posts, which take up a pretty large chunk of its articles and commentaries (though I figure someone must get it). It all leaves me with a kind of “sky-is-falling” feeling, which conclusion, if rinsed and repeated enough times, might, I suppose, even happen.
That is, if I were to believe everything I read there—on economics and finance—I’d get out of the market NOW and invest in gold, but since I’m not IN the market and don’t have any gold (aside from a few tooth fillings), I’m not terribly affected by that, at least. But a financial disaster will of course have repercussions for almost everyone.
Short version: It’s entertaining and informative in a broad, eclectic way, but… “caveat emptor” big-time (as in most things, I guess).
While we’re at it, item #17000 in the file marked “higher ed administrators are smarmy microbes”
https://www.opindia.com/2021/11/sweden-lund-university-researcher-faces-prosecution-for-study-post-rapes-committed-by-immigrants/
And in Finland, a clergyman is being prosecuted for preaching against homosexuality.
And you and I both know that the phonies who run organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House will notice none of this.