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Jeepers, Newbie — I found your essay/post long on bombast and short on intelligibility.

I asked you: Do you believe there is any such thing as human nature itself?

And you answered: Yes. We act on our preprogrammed instincts. Later on, you gratuitously added: Humans are vicious predators. You should start reading history and you should actually read the Bible instead of parroting what your pastor says. [Oh really???]

Here’s what I wonder about: Is Darwinist theory actually telling us that at the very top of the biological hierarchy we find a vicious animal — that is, man? That man is entirely shaped by blind natural processes, rather than that man is shaped by his heredity, the natural environment, and his particular cultural environment?

I have seen efforts by so-called Neo-Darwinist sociobiologists to explain human culture as an evolutionary development in itself. But why would material Nature care about human culture, if Nature purportedly is only interested in the survival of the fittest sexual reproducers, who all boil down to be exclusively material entities? (And yet, doesn’t this in itself imply a final cause at work? See more below.)

On your account, it seems Darwin’s theory leads us to conclude that human beings are preprogrammed to be vicious. Still, I note that not all human beings are “vicious predators.” If that is the case, the ones who are not vicious predators must be doing something to overcome the alleged “preprogramming.” I also note that Darwin’s theory really has nothing to say about the source of the alleged “preprogramming.” It is just “there,” an epistemically prior commitment which is yet totally inexplicable on Darwinian theoretical grounds.

For if something is preprogrammed, two issues instantly arise: (1) A program is constructed to enable a machine to achieve an end, goal, or purpose. But this would be a final cause — something strenuously rejected by materialist science. (2) Programs do not construct themselves: They have a designer; and designers do not reduce to purely material entities.

Seeing the difficulty, Darwinism refuses to grapple with the problem of design in Nature. Rather, Darwinists prefer to speak of apparent design. Which to me is like admitting that Nature is constantly fooling us with a persistent illusion.

This seems to be mantra which you are fond of intoning:

Natural selection is the gradual natural process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of the effect of inherited traits on the differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment.
For a given environment, assuming that the living population already exists and that there is a variation of genetic traits in that population, those traits that enable making more babies than the other traits become more common. Split the population in two and put the two groups in different environments, you'll end up with two different sets of traits being selected for.

How do you reconcile the apparent discrepancy between “preprogramming” and natural selection, which is a alleged to be, as Jacques Monod put it, a purely “natural” process evolving by means of “pure, blind chance,” to no purpose at all?

To me, Darwin’s theory is fundamentally incoherent and self-contradictory through and through. It is not science, but a dogmatic philosophical commitment, an outgrowth of philosophical materialism and the misapplication of Newton’s laws of motion — and it seems the eternal desire of some people at least to escape from God and His Providence (not to mention His Judgment)….

Furthermore, I regard Darwinism itself as a sort of fossil: This is mid-19th-century “science.” Darwin never heard of, for example, Max Planck (who discovered the quantum); Albert Einstein (who discovered the photon and Relativity theory); Gregor Mandel (father of the science of genetics, not to mention he was an Augustinian friar); Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, et al. (the pioneers of quantum mechanics); Georg Cantor (father of set theory and the famous incompleteness theorem); Georges LeMaitre (who first conceived of the Singularity, not to mention that he was a Jesuit priest of monsignor rank); Alan Guth (father of the Big Bang/inflationary universe model); Claude Shannon (father of information theory); the list of the great ones goes on and on, but space prohibits extension here.

In short, since Darwin, two great scientific revolutions have occurred — relativity theory and quantum theory — and we are on the threshold of a third great scientific revolution, the information revolution. And yet none of these revolutions have put so much as a dent in Darwinian orthodoxy. Like Ol’ Man River, it just keeps rolling along….

But to me, this is an act of profound denial of some of the greatest achievements of science that have absolute relevance to biology. The late great Harvard evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr, was evidently aware of this, and seemingly it troubled him deeply. So deeply, that he made a proposal that biology ought to be regarded as a separate, sovereign science in itself, of a stature equal to physics, but with its own sovereign laws.

But I find such a proposal ridiculous; for biological organisms have a physical basis. It’s just that they don’t entirely reduce to their physical basis. [Which is why I think your statement that “the mind is what the brain does” is pretty lame.] To explain them requires more than physics and chemistry. But you can’t come up with a complete description of biological organisms without physics and chemistry.

And you certainly can’t get to a complete description via Darwin’s evolution theory. It explains less than meets the eye, and defies common sense in the process. I gather this has something to do with a penchant to be satisfied with seeing things as they appear, not as they actually are.

But evidently, its acolytes will defend it to their dying breath.

This attitude is not good — for science. IMHO, FWIW.

Welcome to FreeRepublic, R7 Rocket! Thank you so much for writing.

Oh my, I find I left out two other great scientists from my list of greats: Francis Crick and James D. Watson, the two scientists who helped discover the structure of DNA in 1953. It goes without saying that the work of these two scientists is indispensable to the conduct of modern biology.

Of course, Charles Darwin never heard of these two guys.

Also, if I may amplify my earlier suggestion that human nature is a "given" that persists down the millennia of human history [which by the way is what Genesis alleges], not the product of evolutionary development.

Ellis Sandoz limns this issue nicely, to wit:

At the level of common sense, it is evident that human beings have experiences other than sensory perceptions, and it is equally evident that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle explored reality on the basis of experiences far removed from perception. The Socratic "Look and see if this is not the case" does not invite one to survey public opinion but asks one to descend into the psyche, that is, to search reflective consciousness [note: brains per se do not conduct such a search; only minds do]. Moreover, it is evident that the primary nonsensory modes of experience address dimensions of human existence superior in rank and worth to those sensory perception does: experiences of the good, beautiful, and just, of love, friendship, and truth, of all human virtue and vice, and of divine reality. Apperceptive experience is distinguishable from sensory perception and a philosophical science of substance from a natural science of phenomena. Experience of "things" is modeled on the subject–object dichotomy of perception in which the consciousness intends the object of cognition. But such a model or experience and knowing is ultimately insufficient to explain the operations of consciousness with respect to the nonphenomenal reality men approach in moral, aesthetic, and religious experience. Inasmuch as such nonsensory experiences are constitutive of what is distinctive about human existence itself — and of what is most precious to mankind — a purported science of man unable to take account of them is egregiously defective. — "Editor's Introduction," The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12, 1990

And then there are the maunderings of my co-author, Alamo-Girl, and me in our book, Don't Let Science Get You Down, Timothy (2006):

A human being is never consulted about the terms of his coming into the world, nor of his departure from it. It is the essence of the human condition that a man is neither the origin nor the “end” — in the sense of telos, meaning a purpose, or goal — of himself. Meanwhile, in between birth and death, there is a litany of evils to which mortal human nature is subject. “The life of man is really burdened,” as [Eric] Voegelin put it, “with the well-known miseries enumerated by Hesoid. We remember his list of hunger, hard work, disease, early death, and the fear of the injustices to be suffered by the weaker man at the hands of the more powerful — not to mention the problem of Pandora.”

Notwithstanding, Voegelin continued, “as long as our existence is undeformed by phantasies, these miseries are not experienced as senseless. We understand them as the lot of man, mysterious it is true, but as the lot he has to cope with in the organization and conduct of his life, in the fight for survival, the protection of his dependents, and the resistance to injustice, and in his spiritual and intellectual response to the mystery of existence.”

Now the “lot of man” as just given is a description of the condicio humana, the human condition. It is the very basis for the idea of a common humanity, or of a brotherhood of mankind. It is [our] conjecture that it is possible for a person to take great umbrage at this condicio humana, to deplore and reject it, to see it as a grievous insult to one’s own assumed personal autonomy; and so to take flight in an alternative reality that can be structured more according to one’s own wishes, tastes, and desires. And thus, a Second Reality is born.

I allege that Darwinism is such a Second Reality, an attempt to flee the First Reality of God's making, of which man is designated part and participant.

So sue me!!!

Best wishes, R7 Rocket.

Thank you oh so very much for all of your wonderful essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!

But to me, this is an act of profound denial of some of the greatest achievements of science that have absolute relevance to biology.

So very true!

As an example, it is still possible to navigate the earth with Ptolemaic geocentricity. But to navigate the solar system one requires Newtonian physics and heliocentricity. And to leave the solar system, one needs Einstein's General Relativity.

Those who cling to Darwin's explanation as dogma are like those ancient navigators. That an explanation worked in a limited scope does not mean it is informed, accurate, transportable or applicable to a greater scope.

Darwin had no knowledge of modern physics or mathematics. Information theory, grounded on Shannon's mathematical theory of communications, is a branch of Math and not a Science discipline. Shannon's theory dates to the mid-1940's but information theory did not expand and prosper for two decades. The expansion now is exponential.

In their 1953 abiogenesis experiment, Miller and Urey did not have the benefit of Shannon's insights or even the insights of Crick and Watson whose structure of DNA discovery also dates to 1953.

And neither team had yet to understand the full relevance of the encoding of the information content, i.e. DNA/RNA. Indeed, the exploration of genomic information continues.

Truly, when the mathematicians and physicists were brought to the microbiology table they had much to say and a different methodology, e.g. "the absence of evidence is evidence of absence" v "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." And of course the emphasis for them is on the theory whereas the emphasis for the biologists was on the data, i.e. observations (Pattee, et al)

Because of these fundamental differences, there has been significant resistance to their observations (Rosen, Yockey, et al). But the mathematicians and physicists prevail and will continue to prevail.

At the root they have raised the importance of information (successful communication, Shannon) and autonomy and function.

Those who cling to Darwin's explanation bend like pretzels to ignore the obvious existence of biological function - probably because it suggests purpose or design whereas the century old dogma requires everything happen by blind chance. And yet, mathematically, function cannot be ignored (Rosen et al.)

Nor will those outside the math and physics discipline address the rise of autonomy in nature. Indeed, the very existence of the encoding suggests a necessary toggling between autonomy and non-autonomy to gather and extend even the most rudimentary information content (Rocha, Pattee, et al).

Also perhaps feeding the resistance to their observations, there is no known natural origin for information (successful communication), autonomy, function or even inertia.

Bottom line, to me the ones who treat Darwin's theory like dogma are exactly like those who still cling to a geocentric model of the "universe."

Thank God there are very few of the latter and hopefully that fact means the number of the former will also diminish.