Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini report colleagues attempted to silence them from publishing in their new book that Darwin's claim was wrong about natural selection. Some of these dark forces afflicting Fodor were brought to light in a chapter in my own book The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry.

If the reference to Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini sounds familiar to Telic Thoughts readers it is likely due to this. More:

Why not just thrash these ideas out in the open as in other professional fields and properly pay scientists to write reviews instead of sending the journal money off to Wiley? Maybe then science referees (reviewers) would take time from their academic responsibilities to actually read papers submitted – particularly those from the unaffiliated.

Good question.

The article concludes with a bang.

Constructal Theorist Adrian Bejan of Duke University says essentially what the individual investigator is up against is the "academic mafia" and notes the following in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics: "Loaded with bias is the review process reserved for the big projects. The review is run by the "leaders," the persons who head (or have headed) the big projects. They are the influential, the ones who are consulted during the review process and even before a new research initiative is selected for funding by the government. They are many, not one. They constitute a social stratum known colloquially as academic mafias and dark networks (in social dynamics, these terms mean "networks of persons exerting hidden influence"). Favored are the applicants who work for the mafia."

Isn’t it time to stop kissing the ring?

Only four parameters are needed to specify the broad features of the universe as it exists today: the masses of the electron and proton and the current strengths of the electromagnetic and strong interactions. [20] (The strength of gravity enters through the proton mass, by convention.) I have studied how the minimum lifetime of a typical star depends on the first three of these parameters. [21] Varying them randomly in a range of ten orders of magnitude around their present values, I find that over half of the stars will have lifetimes exceeding a billion years. Large stars need to live tens of millions of years or more to allow for the fabrication of heavy elements. Smaller stars, such as our sun, also need about a billion years to allow life to develop within their solar system of planets. Earth did not even form until nine billion years after the big bang. The requirement of long-lived stars is easily met for a wide range of possible parameters. The universe is certainly not fine-tuned for this characteristic.

He continues,

One of the many major flaws with most studies of the anthropic coincidences is that the investigators vary a single parameter while assuming all the others remain fixed. They further compound this mistake by proceeding to calculate meaningless probabilities based on the grossly erroneous assumption that all the parameters are independent. [22] In my study I took care to allow all the parameters to vary at the same time.
Physicist Anthony Aguire has independently examined the universes that result when six cosmological parameters are simultaneously varied by orders of magnitude, and found he could construct cosmologies in which "stars, planets, and intelligent life can plausibly arise." [23] Physicist Craig Hogan has done another independent analysis that leads to similar conclusions. [24] And, theoretical physicists as Kyoto University in Japan have shown that heavy elements needed for life will be present in even the earliest stars independent of what the exact parameters for star formation may have been. [25]" p.148

So does professor Stenger make a good point?

The Maui-based science prodigy (Garrett Lisi) turned the rarefied world of theoretical physics on its ear with a jaw-gaping paper, the audaciously titled An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.

Lisi is a bit out of the ordinary:

He has a Ph.D. and, to that extent, is no outsider. But he has no academic affiliation, let alone tenure.

I think I might like this guy. Lisi, who published his paper in arXiv, is quoted:

In fact, I can now make an unusually strong statement: If one believes in the unification of electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, which there's good evidence for, then the unification with gravity and Higgs particles is inevitable. When one continues this unification by including matter (electrons, quarks, neutrinos), this whole structure fits in E8. Mathematically, this is irrefutable.

Lee Smolin and Lisi have worked together:

But Lisi, says Smolin, is hardly alone on the cutting-edge of E8 theory. Many others are labouring in obscurity in the same direction. And "like most things in theoretical physics, we rarely hit home runs. Most new ideas are incomplete when put forward. Garrett is no different."

What Smolin admires, however, is Lisi's courage in bucking convention to strike out with no safety net.

"What is remarkable about Garrett is the willingness to forgo an academic job in exchange for being intellectually independent. There are only a few precedents for this, but it takes great courage," said Smolin. "It is a healthy thing and I admire him for it. But it is a hard option and I don't want to romanticize it. Garrett's material circumstances are challenging. He doesn't have a lot of money."

Smolin says science is shifting in Lisi's direction, away from the "old-fashioned refereed journals" that once were the lone gatekeepers of new ideas. Now, almost all fresh thought in science appears first on arXiv; it has more than 500,000 papers in the fields of math, physics and computer science. Lisi's theory is reportedly the most downloaded.

There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am all for climate science but not for climate evangelism.

Climate evangelism. How apropos.

Evangelism has a religious ring to it. That would come as no surprise to James Bowman, author of Creation. Judeo-Christian scriptures contain an story of global catastrophe. Of course we are much too sophisticated for ancient views of good and evil and Noah's flood. Now we speak of the size of your environmental footprint and environmental catastrophes resulting from global warming. Government regulations will rescue us if we can just rid ourselves of denialist influences. Quoting from The American Spectator article:

It will come as no news to readers of The American Spectator that science is now no longer just science but has become a religion-substitute for a large number of Americans. This faith, perhaps, claims even a majority of those in some other liberal democracies of the West. And if science, and its political arm, environmentalism, is the new religion, Charles Darwin is its Christ figure, despised and rejected of (theist) men and persecuted for the Truth he sought to bring to set men free of their inherited chains. These are not the bonds of sin and death but of the superstition and ignorance which supposes the world to have had any Creator at all or any Redeemer other than Darwin himself. That is what we mean by myth: a story that explains the world, whether or not the story happens to be true, and the Darwinist myth now comes closer to an explanation that people are prepared to accept than any other since the Redemptive history in the Christian interpretation of the Bible.

Kindly genuflect before reading the linked article and gird yourself against the blasphemous comments of the infidel Bowman.

Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical. The possibility that anything is seriously amiss with Darwin's account of evolution is hardly considered. Such dissent as there is often relies on theistic premises which Darwinists rightly say have no place in the evaluation of scientific theories. So onlookers are left with the impression that there is little or nothing about Darwin's theory to which a scientific naturalist could reasonably object. The methodological scepticism that characterises most areas of scientific discourse seems strikingly absent when Darwinism is the topic.

Indeed.

Moreover, it is perfectly general: it applies to any species, independent of what its phenotype may happen to be. And it is remarkably simple. In effect, the mechanism of trait transmission it postulates consists of a random generator of genotypic variants that produce the corresponding random phenotypic variations, and an environmental filter that selects among the latter according to their relative fitness. And that's all. Remarkable if true.

Compelling evidence
But we don't think it is true. A variety of different considerations suggesting that it is not are mounting up. We feel it is high time that Darwinists take this evidence seriously, or offer some reason why it should be discounted. Our book about what Darwin got wrong reviews in detail some of these objections to natural selection and the evidence for them; this article is a brief summary.

So what's up?

This assumption (phenotype alteration resulting from natural selection pruning mutations) explains the random variation of phenotypic traits over time, but it doesn't explain why phenotypic traits evolve.

An explanation follows leading to this:

So much for the theory, now for the objections. Natural selection is a radically environmentalist theory.

After a bit on B.F. Skinner we arrive at:

In our book, we argue in some detail that much the same is true of Darwin's treatment of evolution: it overestimates the contribution the environment makes in shaping the phenotype of a species and correspondingly underestimates the effects of endogenous variables. For Darwin, the only thing that organisms contribute to determining how next-generation phenotypes differ from parent-generation phenotypes is random variation. All the non-random variables come from the environment.

Suppose, however, that Darwin got this wrong and various internal factors account for the data. If that is so, there is inevitably less for environmental filtering to do.

Now we're getting to a core message from their book- constraints above and below:

The consensus view among neo-Darwinians continues to be that evolution is random variation plus structured environmental filtering, but it seems the consensus may be shifting. In our book we review a large and varied selection of non-environmental constraints on trait transmission. They include constraints imposed "from below" by physics and chemistry, that is, from molecular interactions upwards, through genes, chromosomes, cells, tissues and organisms. And constraints imposed "from above" by universal principles of phenotypic form and self-organisation – that is, through the minimum energy expenditure, shortest paths, optimal packing and so on, down to the morphology and structure of organisms.

This remark reminded me of the ongoing feud between Zachriel and ID guy over nested hierarchies:

Pigs don't have wings, but that's not because winged pigs once lost out to wingless ones. And it's not because the pigs that lacked wings were more fertile than the pigs that had them. There never were any winged pigs because there's no place on pigs for the wings to go.

Here's an opening for top down analytics:

So, how many constraints on the evolution of phenotypes are there other than those that environmental filtering imposes? Nobody knows, but the picture now emerging is of many, many of them operating in many, many different ways and at many, many different levels. That's what the evolutionary developmental school of biology and the theory that gene regulatory networks control our underlying development both suggest. And it strikes us as entirely plausible.

This next comment relates to an insistent question posed by John A. Designer in a previous thread.

We should stress that every such case (and we argue in our book that free-riding is ubiquitous) is a counter-example to natural selection. Free-riding shows that the general claim that phenotypic traits are selected for their effects on fitness isn't true.

The concluding paragraph:

However, the internal evidence to back this imperialistic selectionism strikes us as very thin. Its credibility depends largely on the reflected glamour of natural selection which biology proper is said to legitimise. Accordingly, if natural selection disappears from biology, its offshoots in other fields seem likely to disappear as well. This is an outcome much to be desired since, more often than not, these offshoots have proved to be not just post hoc but ad hoc, crude, reductionist, scientistic rather than scientific, shamelessly self-congratulatory, and so wanting in detail that they are bound to accommodate the data, however that data may turn out. So it really does matter whether natural selection is true.

A new study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences rejects the theory that the origin of life stems from a system of self-catalytic molecules capable of experiencing Darwinian evolution without the need of RNA or DNA and their replication.

…. For the first time a rigorous analysis was carried out to study the supposed evolution of these molecular networks using a combination of numerical and analytical simulations and network analysis approximations. Their research demonstrated that the dynamics of molecular compound populations which divide after having reached a critical size do not evolve, since during this process the compounds lose properties which are essential for Darwinian evolution.

Researchers concluded that this fundamental limitation of "compound genomes" should lead to caution towards theories that set metabolism first as the origin as life, even though former metabolic systems could have offered a stable habitat in which primitive polymers such as RNA could have evolved.

It looks like the "metabolism first" scenario is out, and it's back to finding the original genetic material.

Advocates of Intelligent Design contend that complex biological features cannot arise by chance, the implication being that chance equates to sentient forces. From a scientific vantage, however, the driving force of adaptive evolution–natural selection– is itself the antithesis of chance. Hereditary factors that promote organismal survival and reproduction in a particular environment tend to be precisely those that proliferate across the generations and thereby come to characterize natural populations. Whenever genetic variation and differential reproduction exist in nature (as they do in all known species), natural selection is inevitable, both logically and empirically. Biological traits that emerge from this inexorable operation may have the superficial aura of intelligent artistry, but that appearance is illusory (under a scientific interpretation). Natural selection can be a highly creative process (given a suitable supply of genetic variation to work from), but it is merely a mechanistic phenomenon– as inescapable and insentient as gravity.

I do not believe, as Dr. Meyer asserts, that he is unqualified—quite the opposite. He is likely more qualified as a philosopher than I am as a scientist. Furthermore, I guarantee you that if I was venturing into his discipline, I would have little of value to say. Dr. Meyer has ventured into my discipline, biology. He is not highly qualified as a biologist, but he’s ventured in anyway. Fair enough. Since he is a great communicator, we should be able to analyze the quality of his arguments.

here

It should be pointed out at this juncture that the biological points made by Darrel Falk in his exchanges with Meyer are easily understood by most freshman students in biology. I have a daughter who is a freshman and an intending major in biology who has no difficulty following Falk's points. Of course Falk might maintain that his deeper understanding would confound both Meyer and my daughter and account for any divergence of views but in what follows I'll show that to be a mistaken assumption.

In Meyer’s response to my review, he made a very strong statement. I am amazed that someone who is really smart and equally sincere could make it, but here it is

First, intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information (especially in a digital form). Second, no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power. Hence, intelligent design provides the best—most causally adequate—explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life from simpler non-living chemicals. In other words, intelligent design is the only explanation that cites a cause known to have the capacity to produce the key effect in question. (Emphasis added)

What is he saying here? First of all he says that intelligent agents are known to produce specified complexity. Of course. But look at what he says next: “no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power.” Surely he doesn’t mean this. Consider the generation of antibody diversity for example. When a bacterium invades the body, a process results in a whole lot of random rearrangements of DNA sequence, and this eventually produces trillions of highly specific antibodies which specifically recognize and bind to the invading bacterial cells. The antibodies are highly specified. They bind only to that one type of bacteria. We go from a state of lower complexity to higher complexity—higher specified complexity! The process that generates this specified complexity is pure chemistry. A set of random processes have generated the highly specified information required to fight the bacterial infection. Surely none of us would believe there is a little “intelligent being” in the body directing the body step-by-step to make the correct antibody. We know it doesn’t work that way. The universe of biology is full of examples of random processes giving rise to specified information.

I'm amazed that someone as smart as Falk responds like this to Meyer's point. He's right of course about the immunological reaction but it was clear to me while reading the book that Meyer was addressing the origin of biologically functional DNA. Computer programs generate specified information too, do they not? We're tracing a causal source. I suspect Meyer's critics know this but have decided to wave a red cape in hope that readers will follow it rather than Meyer's trail of logic. After all you would not take issue with a professional matador would you?

Now at this point, Dr. Meyer might step in and remind me of our common belief that there is a Mind who established life’s processes, a Mind whose presence is necessary to sustain the laws of the universe. Sure. We both accept that. But that’s beside the point. There are “undirected chemical processes” that produce functionally specified information.

Yes, Dr. Falk but the relevant question is: did an undirected chemical process generate a functional cell? The process issue is related to a specified event.

If he wants to beg the question by saying that there is a Mind that created the DNA which would ultimately cause the random processes—fine.

Having read what Meyer wrote I would rephrase Meyer's argument as posing the question as an open issue allowing for both chemical pathways as well as the end product of a mind. Meyer states the mind better fits the causal source for a functionally sequenced DNA outcome.

But, if he does this, I would go back further and argue that if he is going to beg the question this way, he needs to be willing to beg the question all the way back—there could also have simply been a Mind who established the system so that DNA arose through natural undirected processes. We just don’t know how it worked. And that’s my point. The data is simply not in yet.

Falk is a better philosopher than he credits hmself as being. Grasp the significance of a professional, immersed in a discipline whose predictions are empirically confirmed, acknowledging that an empirical approach has not yielded answers. He is essentially admitting that limitations on predictions about life's origin are a boundary beyond which his chosen field has been unable to transgress. Yet it is clear that Falk also believes this to be a temporary state of affairs. One day…

Falk is a philosophical naturalist. I have no doubt that he is also a Christian who believes God sustains the universe and ordered it so that the physical processes we observe now, would have been causally sufficient at point of origin to generate life. That's philosophy and Falk is doing a good job of advancing it while leading the interference with his beefy blocking scientific credentials.

I emphasize again, all that Dr. Meyer has done is identified an area of science that still has many unanswered questions. For sure, it is simply far too early to jump in and say: “Stop the game. You’ve lost. We’ve won. Game’s over!” This, in my opinion, is silly. Let’s just wait and see.

I do not recall reading that Meyer advises mainstream origin of lifers to abandon their lab work. He did make some arguments, involving natural selection and sequence specificity, that Falk has not responded to.

Just because I believe Steve Meyer and his colleagues are really smart, really sincere, and really have integrity does not mean that they cannot also be really wrong. My one hope and prayer—given that they have the first three qualities—is that the day will come when they admit the fourth holds true as well. In the meantime, I will hold them up in prayer and I know they’ll do the same for us.

Falk quoted from scripture in his response. I'll do the same. From First Romans:

19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.- NIV Version

Meyer and I perceive those divine qualites in DNA. We also doubt the causal sufficiency of chemical pathways to effect a biologically functional DNA outcome. The doubt is grounded in function and the theoretical weaknesses of natural selection as an explanation for chemical pathways to cells.

Falk first cites a scientific study published last spring after my book was in press. The paper, authored by University of Manchester chemist John Sutherland and two colleagues, does partially address one of the many outstanding difficulties associated the RNA world, the most popular current theory about the origin of the first life.

Starting with a 3-carbon sugar (D-gylceraldehyde), and another molecule called 2-aminooxazole, Sutherland successfully synthesized a 5-carbon sugar in association with a base and a phosphate group. In other words, he produced a ribonucleotide. The scientific press justifiably heralded this as a breakthrough in pre-biotic chemistry because previously chemists had thought (as I noted in my book) that the conditions under which ribose and bases could be synthesized were starkly incompatible with each other.

Nevertheless, Sutherland’s work does not refute the central argument of my book, nor does it support the claim that it is premature to conclude that only intelligent agents have demonstrated the power to produce functionally-specified information. If anything, it illustrates the reverse.

Very true. Sutherland's work is causally inadequate as an explanatory model for the issues raised in Meyer's book.

In Chapter 14 of my book I describe and critique the RNA world scenario. There I describe five major problems associated with the theory. Sutherland’s work only partially addresses the first and least severe of these difficulties: the problem of generating the constituent building blocks or monomers in plausible pre-biotic conditions. It does not address the more severe problem of explaining how the bases in nucleic acids (either DNA or RNA) acquired their specific information-rich arrangements. In other words, Sutherland’s experiment helps explain the origin of the “letters” in the genetic text, but not their specific arrangement into functional “words” or “sentences.”

That's the core message. An explanation for sequential arrangements is not only lacking, it is not revealed by chemical based scenarios. Coding properties are not sourced from chemical determinism. Sequential arrangements are pegged to biological function. The arrangements themselves merely code for components enabling function. Not incorporating this into causal explanations says in effect: the basic property of DNA must be excluded from the explanation of its origin. If encoded nucleic acids precede function then an explanation, other than a functional one, must account for biologically relevant sequencing. This can lead to the treadmill effect we witness in origin of life research.

Back to Meyer's reaction to Sutherland:

First, Sutherland chose to begin his reaction with only the right-handed isomer of the 3-carbon sugars he needed to initiate his reaction sequence. Why? Because he knew that otherwise the likely result would have had little biologically-significance. Had Sutherland chosen to use a far more plausible racemic mixture of both right and left-handed sugar isomers, his reaction would have generated undesirable mixtures of stereoisomers—mixtures that would seriously complicate any subsequent biologically-relevant polymerization. Thus, he himself solved the so-called chirality problem in origin-of-life chemistry by intelligently selecting a single enantiomer, i.e., only the right-handed sugars that life itself requires. Yet there is no demonstrated source for such non-racemic mixture of sugars in any plausible pre-biotic environment.

Second, the reaction that Sutherland used to produce ribonucleotides involved numerous separate chemical steps. At each intermediate stage in his multi-step reaction sequence, Sutherland himself intervened to purify the chemical by-products of the previous step by removing undesirable side products. In so doing, he prevented—by his own will, intellect and experimental technique—the occurrence of interfering cross-reactions, the scourge of the pre-biotic chemist.

Third, in order to produce the desired chemical product—ribonucleotides—Sutherland followed a very precise “recipe” or procedure in which he carefully selected the reagents and choreographed the order in which they were introduced into the reaction series, just as he also selected which side products to be removed and when. Such recipes, and the actions of chemists who follow them, represent what the late Hungarian physical chemist Michael Polanyi called “profoundly informative intervention[s].” Information is being added to the chemical system as the result of the deliberative actions—the intelligent design—of the chemist himself.

In sum, not only did Sutherland’s experiment not address the more fundamental problem of getting the nucleotide bases to arrange themselves into functionally-specified sequences, the extent to which it did succeed in producing more life-friendly chemical constituents actually illustrates the indispensable role of intelligence in generating such chemistry.