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betty boop has made a series of wonderfully informative and insightful posts on a thread in the Smokey Backroom which I have accumulated below for discussion here.

IMHO, it is important to keep great insights where others are more likely to read them. The Smokey Backroom is after all, notorious for being harsh and unwelcoming.

Besides I have the selfish motive of wanting to bookmark them altogether as a collection. LOL!:

…I guess. I don't like the thought that Darwinism and ID are "competing theories." Further, I do not see that creationism is a theory in the scientific sense; and well you say that ID presented as such would probably not get a fair shake in classrooms under present conditions. I think that's unfortunate; for certainly ID would have to include such things as information theory (e.g., Shannon's theory of communications), applications of quantum field theory to living systems, the mathematical basis of genetic coding, etc. ID is not "monolithic" and does not have a full-blown theory. What it is so well suited for, however, is its searching interest in asking the right questions, and looking in certain new areas of science that have been developing over the past several decades, but which do not seem to have come to the attention of neoDarwinian theorists.

ID gets a bad rap because people have been misled as to what it signifies. It does not propose any particular intelligent agent or phenomenon, and does not seem to be an argument for "special creation," of a God constantly intervening in the physical universe. Plus it has no eschatology, no holy writ, no dogmas, no hierarchical authority -- in short it bears no signs that we associate with religion or religious practice.

post 193

Personally I doubt evolutionary theory has much to fear from the disciplines of ID, and perhaps has much to gain from them. For instance, the mathematical physicist Hubert Yockey, who's evidently a great admirer of Charles Darwin, taking a page from physics, wants to place the theory on a more rigorous, mathematical basis. I don't know why anyone would object to that.

Maybe this is some kind of turf war between the life scientists on the one side, and the physicists and mathematicians on the other, with the former regarding the latter as illegitimately poaching on their territory? The late, great Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr, for instance, suggested that perhaps biology should be an independent discipline from the rest of science, to be regarded as sovereign in its own way as physics is in its. But to me this wouldn't be a very good idea, for without doubt living systems have a material basis in physics and chemistry, notwithstanding they are more than what that material basis can describe....

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Darwin said that "life can only come from life." He never said where life came from. Neils Bohr agreed, saying the origin of life is simply unknowable -- not just "unknown," but "unknowable" on principle -- and thus could never be a proper subject for scientific investigation. And Hubert Yockey agrees with both men that the origin of life is "unknowable." And yet: There Life is!

All this really boils down to for me is that the origin of life is "unknowable" on the basis of reason alone, thus scientific methodology cannot give an account for it. To get the "full picture," Spirit, faith is required: Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive, but equally necessary complementarities for a proper understanding of man and the universe.

Yockey is really interesting -- I'd love to see him taken up in the public schools. He suggests that living systems do not "bottom out" in physics and chemistry, but have a deeper cause, which is essentially mathematical or geometrical in form.

But to me the main point is that for neither the case of an origin in geometry nor an origin in physics/chemistry, no one knows what the origin of the geometry or the physics/chemistry is. THIS is the PRIME "unknowable." Science must remain silent with respect to it, for its method cannot reach to it.

And so we are left in a situation where there is no evident "objective standard" by which either theory (chemistry vs. geometry) can be falsified.... (Might this be a tip-off that they may actually be "complementary," in Bohr's meaning of that word?)

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Hitler's racialist policies were undoubtedly justified on "survival of the fittest" grounds, that entailed that people considered to be "less fit" could be expunged. Peter Singer continues to make that argument today, from the hallowed halls of Princeton. You don't think he got that idea from the Gospel of Saint John, do you?

post 259

Jeepers, I've heard Richard Dawkins wax poetic over the splendors of the ant heap via-a-vis the sort of social order that Western man has historically considered natural and normative. There are individuals in an ant heap too, ya know. But they are not "individuals" in the way we usually think of human beings.

post 263

Science believes all the time: It believes in the importance of the questions it is asking, it believes that the design of the experiment to test the proposition is suitable, it believes that the evidence it gathers and qualifies in the prosecution of finding the answer to the question is appropriate.... It believes in the power of reason and logic. It believes in "objective" physical laws that can be faithfully applied to problems to get valid answers. Science believes all the time, at every step; and so, I imagine, do you -- though you apparently do not recognize it....

I'd only wish to add that it was exclusively within the Western civilizational orbit -- which is traditionally classical and JudeoChristian in belief -- that systematic science even got started in the first place. And nowhere else. I'll leave it up to you to discover why that is. It really is an "interesting problem!"

post 276

All speculation on the origin of life on Earth by chance cannot survive the first criterion of life: proteins are left-handed, sugars in DNA and RNA are right-handed. Omne vivum ex vivo [which I translated as "life comes only from life" -- this being my translation from Yockey's book; and so I put it in quotes].... Of Darwin's view of the matter, Yockey writes: "[Darwin] believed that life appeared by some wholly unknown process, and therefore [its origin] is undecideable."

Yockey writes: "Niels Bohr (1933) proposed that life is consistent with but undecideable or unknowable by human reasoning from physics or chemistry.... Darwin did not believe that life emerged in a 'warm little pond.' Darwin believed that the origin of life is unknowable or undecideable."

Yockey devotes most of chapter 8 of his book Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life to show how Darwin did not hold with Haeckel's Urschlein of a prebiotic Earth, "where chemical evolution and its putative consequence, life, arose spontaneously in flagrante delicto from this non-living matter...."

As Darwin wrote,

I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal ... term of creation, by which I merely meant "appeared" by some wholly unknown process. It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.... [Darwin, 1898, Yockey's emphasis]

...It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction.... [Origin of Species; Yockey does not give the page reference, but does add the italics.]

Darwin essentially takes the "origin" or "essence" of life for granted. He is saying his scientific theory is independent of it; which is a very good thing, because it is "undecideable" or "unknowable" anyway.

Neils Bohr gets the last word here [from his "Light and Life" lecture of 1933]:

The recognition of the essential importance of fundamentally atomistic features in the function of living organisms is by no means sufficient, however, for a comprehensive explanation of biological phenomena, before we can reach an understanding of life on the basis of physical experience. Thus, we should doubtness kill an animal if we tried to carry the investigation of its organs so far that we could describe the role played by single atoms in vital functions. In every experiment on living organisms, there must remain an uncertainty as regards the physical conditions to which they are subjected, and the idea suggests itself that the minimal freedom we must allow the organism in this respect is just large enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us.

The most "ultimate" secret being its life "principle" (for lack of a better word) -- which cannot under any experimental conditions be revealed to direct observation, for the reasons Bohr gives in the immediately above (i.e., if you go looking, sooner or later you kill the specimen; and the dead cannot speak of the living).

So, life being something that is not directly investigatable, arising from that which is unknowable, our default position must seem to be: Omne vivum ex vivo.

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