Prescribed Evolution
I have my own blog now, only because I have been banned from just about all the others. Since I am computer illiterate, don't expect very much from me. I welcome any comments about my published papers including my unpublished "An Evolutionary Manifesto: A New Hypothesis For Organic Change." I will tend to ignore any denigrations either of myself or my distinguished sources. I will also not take seriously comments from anonymous posters although I will respond provided they are civil.
posted by Anonymous at 7:30 AM
776 Comments:
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Just to get the ball rolling I will pose some fundamental questions. When was life created? How many times was life created? Where was life created? How was life created?
While I have some strong opinions about these matters, I would prefer to hear from others before presenting them.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
"When was life created?"
Sometime in the past.
"How many times was life created?"
One or more times.
"Where was life created?"
In the space-time continuum.
"How was life created?"
Purposely.
By the way, Professor Davison, I'm one comment away from being banned from wikipedia. I bet you haven't been banned there yet.
I'd purely love it if you went there and told them what for in the way only you can. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Intelligent_design
When you get to somewhere you want to comment click on the first "edit" button above the point you want add a comment. Find your place in the new window, type your schpiel, and then press the "save" button at the bottom.
I know you'll enjoy being a Wiki editor until they ban you!
Say, what the heck happened to Rohn Jennie? That wimp stopped showing up at his blog in July.
Thanks for being the first Dave. I left 12 unanswered posts ar SciAm perspectives after which John Rennie closed his shop. Since he never banned me I never felt comnpelled to refer him as Rohn Jennie. I reserved that honor for those that had either banned me or deleted me or disemvoweled me or put me in stir one way or another like Esley Welsberry, M.P. Zeyers. Dilliam Wembski, ARN and EvC, etc. etc. In retrospect it was frightfully infantile of me to resort to such tactics and I am doing my level best now to act my age. I accept full responsibility for my hideous behavior. Ive even been banned at Terry Trainor's forum Evolution? - Creation? - or Both? I just lost my patience. Incidentally, I am the one responsible for adding or Both?, a position I still hold.
I am glad to see that you agree with me that no one knows for sure the answer to the four questions I posed. Thanks for posting.
Thank you Terry. Terry Trainor, for those of you who may not know this, is the one who came up with the phrase - "Davison is the Darwinian's worst nightmare." I must say that has a nice ring to it. However, Trainor is also probably correct is predicting that the Darwinians will pretend I do not exist. After all, that is what they have already done for 21 years and what they have always done with their critics, from Mivart in Darwin's own day right up to the present. They have even managed to ignore Julian Huxley who introduced the term "Modern Synthesis" in the title of his 1942 book.
I just finished a manuscript, "Julian Huxley's Confession," a draft of which is available at ISCID's "brainstorms" forum. I have not yet transmitted it for publication but will if it continues to be ignored by the establishment. I may anyhow. I always offer up my schlock for general consideration before sending it off to be perpetuated on the shelves of the world's libraries. That seems like a reasonable way to proceed don't you think? I highly recommend it. Incidentally, I am still hoping some weak-minded publishing house would be willing to publish my "An Evolutionary Manifesto: A New Hypothesis For Organic Change."
Actually, since I am sure not getting any younger, what I would really like to see is something with a title such as "The Collected Evolutionary Papers Of John A. Davison." Does anyone think that might be possible?
I suspect and sincerely hope this question might serve to rouse the establishment from its slumber. In the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
"I'm an old campaigner and I love a good fight."
or those of a fellow predestinationist, General George S. Patton:
"War, God help me, I love it so!"
davescot
I visited wikipedia talk and I was unable to get a window to open. It is probably just as well. I don't see much point in getting banned any more. While it is revealing it becomes tiresome after a time. That is why I opened this blog. In the words of that famous reformationist and racial bigot, Martin Luther:
"Here I stand. I can do no otherwise."
He also said:
"When I pass wind in Wittenburg they can smell it in Rome."
I've been passing anti-Darwinian evolutionary gas in Burlington Vermont for 21 years and they still seem unable to smell it at Oxford, Harvard, Cornell or anyplace else for that matter. I've also offered an alternative to the most demonstrably failed hypothesis in the history of science. Maybe this blog will serve to sharpen up their olfacatory senses but I wouldn't bet on it.
I notice that Terry Trainor posted under his real name which I regard as a virtue. That sets a good initial tone for this blog. I happen to know that davescot is an alias but I wouldn't dream of diclosing his real identity. That is somethimng that he must do if his views are to be taken seriously here on this blog. I am supremely confident that he will be more than willing to comply with such a simple request.
Now don't misunderstand me. I would love to hear from some of the "old gang" at Panda's Thumb like Sir Toe Jam whom I renamed Joe Tam and I am equally happy to field the comments of Wayne Francis who even supplied his middle initial E.
I have respect for those who will express themselves especially when they do so with their real names. Imagine, if you can, a scientific literature presented by unidentifiable investigators. What a nightmare that would be. How could one cite their papers? Yet that is exactly what has happened in the wonderful world of cyberspace. It boggles my ancient mind that this ever became established as the norm which it most certainly did.
Anyhow, this is just one of my pet idiosyncrasies and so I say "bring em on" with or without their real identity. I have done my level best to gain the attention of the evolutionary community. I have religiously followed the advice of "der Alte," Konrad Adenauer:
"First make yourself unpopular, then they will take you seriously."
I keep trying Konrad but it doesn't seem to be working.
Would you have chastised the founding fathers for publishing the Federalist Papers under the pen name Publius instead of their real names Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay?
Would you shake your finger at Mark Twain for not using his real name Samuel Clemons?
I choose to follow a tradition held in great esteem by some truly great Americans. Of course this is your blog and if you don't want pen names I'll respect your wishes and post no further comments here.
Thanks Dave. I never said I wouldn't allow pen names. What I said was that I don't have to take them seriously and I won't. If you choose to stop posting here that is your decision not mine. Besides, everybody knew who Thomas Paine and Samuel Clemens were. Their works were published in hard copy. All I am trying to do is to introduce an element of respectability and responsibility into a medium that could use some of both.
Come one, come all with whatever handle pleases you. I particularly welcome William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe, William Provine, Francisco Ayala and Richard Dawkins as they, like myself, all have attached their real names to their published pronouncements. That may not mean much to some but it means a great deal to me. I doubt if any of them will respond which in itself has significance.
I am sure you already know that I have rejected both religious fundamentalism and Darwinian mysticism. There is no place for either in the search for the truth concerning ontogeny and phylogeny, two intimately related processes each proceeding on the basis of stored, preformed and highly specified information.
"A cluster of facts makes it very plain that Mendelian, allelomorphioc mutation plays no part in creative evolution. It is, as it were, a more or less pathological fluctuation in the genetic code. It is an accident on the 'magnetic tape' on which the primary information for the species is recorded."
Pierre Grasse, "Evolution of Living Organisms," page 243
For what it is worth, Carl Zimmer still permits me to post at "The Loom" but never lets my posts appear It is in effect a banishment.
Here is a partial list of forums from which I have been excluded apparently for life.
ARN, where I cannot even view.
EvC
Panda's Thumb
Pharyngula
FringeSciences
Uncommon Descent
The Austringer
The Loom
CreationEvolutionDesign
SciAm perspectives (apparently Rennie closed his blog)
I am currently posting again at ISCID's brainstroms but it is a pale shadow of its former self.
I'm banned at Trainor's forum simply because I can't deal with one of the participants there.
I mention this to explain why I have opened my own blog. Since the professionals still fail to acknowledge either my several papers or those of my many predecessors it is my responsibility to use every venue at my disposal to further the contributions of my predecessors to my own extension of their convictions in the form of a discussion of the subject of this blog.
To slightly modify an old saw:
"You can lead a man to the literature but you cannot make him read it."
Where are all those insults that used to be heaped on me at EvC, Pharyngula and Panda's Thumb? Sockittome! I love it so. I can't delete you and wouldn't if I could. Let's get it on. I'm so bored. Incidentally, those were Winston Churchill's last three words and I find them most appropriate to the situation here.
"Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don't ever apologize for anything."
Harry S. Truman
who also advised:
"Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day."
My kind of guy.
How do you like them apples?
Well it looks like we lost davescot which is very unfortunate because he has some very good ideas to offer. Like myself, he has been banned from many forums for being very straightforward with his comments. I was hoping when I listed those forums from which I have been banned that he would play "I can top that" but apparently he isn't interested.
The way we both have been treated is reminiscent of Winston Churchill's comment:
"I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents."
Dembski over at Uncommon Descent has just given a glowing endorsement to Tom Bethel's book "The politically incorrect guide to science." In it Bethell presents 33 "myths," a couple of which I find especially troubling. Bethel, with Dembski's blessing, dismisses global warming but that is trivial in comparison with numbers 26 and 27 in which it is denied that the mass extinctions we are now witnessing are due to human activity. If they are not due to human activity just what are they due to?
Leakey has conservatively estimated species extinction at 20,000 per year. It doesn't take a genius to calculate how long it might take for 10 million species all to disappear if such a trend were to continue. It also is fairly obvious that this must be a very recent development or we would be all alone on the planet. To deny that a monoculture of 7 billion large mammals has not profoundly affected the ecosystem is insane, especially when there is roughly the same number of chickens and other livestock whose collective numbers are also in the billions. Quite apart from industrial sources, the CO2 emissions from the animal world alone are sufficient to account for global warming especially since the primary sinks for the CO2, the tropical rain forests, are also disappearing at an alarming rate, all due to human activity, without question the greatest single monoculture in terms of biomass in the history of the planet. Dembski should be more cautious in his blanket endorsements. I would have posted at Uncommon Descent but I have been banned.
Thank you Phil Engle and I wish you well with your new weblog:
Evolution & NonLinear Science
Be prepared to be ignored, thereby joining with St George Jackson Mivart, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Reginald C. Punnett, Leo Berg, Robert Broom, Otto Schindewolf, Pierre Grasse and of course the father of modern genetics, William Bateson all of whom have exposed the inadequacies of the most tested and failed hypothesis in the history of science. It is a very exclusive club and we should both be honored to have joined it. Good luck.
Incidentally davescot, I do not "shake my finger" at my adversaries. I have finally reached the point where I am more likely to "give it to them." You may wtrite that down.
John,
re give them the finger vs. wagging it. That gave me a good laugh. Did you entertain your students so when you were still teaching classes?
You didn't lose me, there just hasn't been much to respond to on a minute by minute basis. My hands (CTS) aren't getting any better either.
I partly agree that Bethel's book doesn't deserve a glowing review and said as much in the comments on Dembski's blog referring to about half of it as a laundry list of hyperbolic claims that give thoughtful conservatives a bad name. Bethel's far too ambitious in number of claims to have been duly diligent on all of them.
However, on global warming, I'm not sure puny mankind is having much of an effect or if he is, whether he isn't just a natural factor in the cycle (if not us then something else would do the same thing). The planet earth, as I'm sure you know, has been undergoing warm/cool cycles for a very long time before man appeared on the scene. Solar influx has been growing over that time while heating by radioactive decay has been declining. That balance is one of those (many) things that points to a BFL.
Similarly, biodiversity waxes and wanes over geologic time. It is at a high point right now and, again, was at a high long before mankind came on the scene. One might reasonably expect that when the number of species is near an all time high the number of species extinctions would be high as well, if for no other reason than there's so many candidates available to die out. Species appear to have limited lifetimes so if there's more of them alive there's more of them nearing the end of their alloted time. Maybe there's a just a periodic housecleaning, a thinning of the herd so to speak, programmed into phylogeny by the BFL, and again if not humans, something else would trigger it in our absence like it has in the past.
You know how I like to make analogies between biological evolution and computers so I'll end with saying that mass extinctions may be the way the BFL performs a reboot - i.e. hits the reset switch to get rid of transient accumulations of junk.
Glad to see you are back Dave. I am afraid biodiversity is not at an all time high at all for the simple reason that beginning roughly with the industrial revolution we have been losing species at an ever accelerating rate. Chopping down the tropical rainforest alone has caused the loss of hundreds of thousand of species and not one has been replaced through evolution. I am relying pretty heavily on Leakey's "The Sixth Extinction" and just ordered a copy from Amazon so I can speak with more authority. Also with Broom, Huxley and Grasse I am convinced that true speciation and the formation of any of the higher categories is no longer occurring and, at the genus level and above, has not occurred in the last 2 million years. I am also of the opinion that no true species have arisen in historical times. I have published as much in any event and I see no reason I should recant. All we see is rampant extinction. If there ever was a time for rapid environmental changes to stimulate evolution it is right now yet it is not occurring. Phylogeny, like ontogeny, is a self-limiting process with extinction the counterpart of death. Both processes were front loaded by the BFL (Big front loader) and the environment never had anything to do with either of them.
There is ABSOLUTELY nothing in neoDarwinism that has anything to do with evolution except the production of varieties in some but certainly not all forms. Natural selection is anti-evolutionary and so is sexual reproduction. I figure you already know that I have published these conclusions but I appreciate the opportunity to reiterate them once again for those who don't know where I am coming from. Darwinism is a disgrace, a deceit and a hoax. It is the only intellectual refuge for a mentality that refuses to recognize that there was purpose in the design of the universe.
The Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis (PEH) is nothing more than an extension and elaboration of the conclusions of William Bateson, Reginald C. Punnett, Leo S. Berg, Pierre Grasse and Otto Schindewolf, every one a real scientist and not one a self-proclaimed evolutionist like Gould Mayr, Provine and Dawkins. Those clowns spent most of their lives glued to their endowed chairs, cranking out God only knows how many linear feet of pure science fiction.
The PEH remains in concert with everything we REALLY know from developmental biology, taxonomy, genetics, chromosome structure and function and the fossil record. Natural Selection was nothing but the simultaneous vision of a couple of Victorian naturalists who both happened to have read about Charles Lyell's unifomitarianism and Thomas Malthus' little essay on population. One of them, Alfred Russel Wallace, had the good sense to completely abandon it later in life. The other one spawned what can only be described as 146 years of sustained mass hysteria.
NeoDarwinism will soon be nothing but a footnote right next to the Phlogiston of Chemistry and the Ether of Physics. Mivart shot it down in Darwin's own day when hes asked - how can Natural Selection influence a structure that has not yet appeared?
I really believe that Darwinians are homozygous at the atheist materialist locus amd will never accept that which was so obvious to Einstein:
"Everything is determined... by forces over which we have no control."
Trust me but of course you won't. Sorry to hear about your hands.
Thanks for giving me an excuse to hold forth. Keep in touch.
Heads up, Doctor.
http://blog.sciam.com/
Here's where Rennie went without telling anyone. He was probably embarrassed by what he wrote in the old blog. Or perhaps he was banned by the owner of the blogging service which would sure be poetic justice.
In geologic time the beginning of the industrial revolution was a split second ago. We're probably still at a biodiversity peak compared to any past millenia even with the supposed loss of hundreds of thousands of species which we both know is a wild guess since none of those ostensibly lost were documented. I think it's alarmist crap but even if it isn't there've been mass extinctions in the past so it's just a part of the natural order of things. The ice caps have melted in the past too. Many times. Maybe mankind has added just enough heat to prevent the next ice age. How many species you figure might get lost when most of the fresh water on the planet gets locked up in continent spanning glaciers and ocean salinity skyrockets?
Dear Dave,
There is no wild guess about the hundreds of thousands of species that have become extinct in the past century. That is not a matter for conjecture as it is documented. At 20,000 per annum, you can calculate as well as I.
I also do not subscribe to a cyclic evolution which is going to repeat itself in any way. Organic evolution has never been cyclic, never reversible, but always ascending and goal seeking, exactly as, is still, the development of a unique individual from a prescribed fertilized egg. The goal was reached with the production of Homo sapiens, probably no more distant than 100 thousand years ago. I repeat my challenge to document the arrival of a single mammalian species more recent than ourselves. I predict more silence, a silence I find both gratifying and significant.
I am also willing to predict with certainty our immediate ancestor in case anyone should be interested. You only have to ask.
I realize I sound like an alarmist but then so did Rachel Carson with her "Silent Spring" and for the same reasons, both sound and documented.
We are still operating under the naive notion that the forces we see today are the same forces that have operated in the past. That is only natural but that does not mean that it is correct. Nothing supports it. We do not see evolution in action but only the products of a past evolution, a process that was designed from beginning to end and is now terminated.
Thanks for keeping this experiment alive. At least you recognize there is a problem, something the Darwinians have never done.
Thanks for contributing.
Save your hands champ!
davescot
Thanks for finding out what happened to Rennie. I see no means to comment at his new blog. Am I missing something? Maybe he doesn't want to interact. If I were him I sure wouldn't want to. Actually none of the Darwinians want to. Why else would they insist on all the dirty tricks they find necessary to play on their critics? It is all so very revealing.
"War, God help me, I love it so!"
General George S. Patton, a fellow determinist.
It is difficult to wage war with wet paper bags as adversaries.
One of the most interesting unanswered questions about evolution is this one. How many separate times was life created? In proceeding to provide potential answers to this question I assume that life was indeed created and did not arise accidentally. That assumption will probably automatically lose me the audience of the Darwinians who seem to feel that everything in evolution was accidental, an assumption I find to be unacceptable. They also start with the asumption that life was created once or a very few times another asumption for which there is no justification and plenty of reasons to question.
Evolution WAS (past tense) a series of profound interruptions, from the production of true species right on up the taxonomic ladder to the formation of genera, families, orders, classes and phyla. The question I am attempting o answer is this one. At what point in this heirarchy are we unable to account for reproductive continuity (evolution)?
Before going any further I want to mention another reason for bring up up this matter. It was presented 83 years ago by Leo Berg in one of the most remarkable statements in all the evolutionary literature. In comparing his views with the mono or oligo-phyleticism of the Darwinians:
"Organisms have developed from tens of thousands of primary forms, i.e. polyphyletically."
Nomogenesis, page 406
One might say that it is impossible to even speculate about this basic question. I do not agree. We already have plenty of information on which to base certain speculations.
One way to proceed is by seeing to what extent one can account for what we know to be true by invoking undeniable cytogenetic and ontogenetic facts.
This can be taken as installment number one. Before presenting anything further, I welcome any comments.
Hey folks, I just learned that the Kansas school board voted 6 to 4 in favor of including Intelligent Design. It is revealing that all 6 were republicans while the 4 were split evenly democrat and republican. That figures as whether one is going to be a republican (conservative) or a democrat (liberal) was probably prescribed just like everything else was.
"Everything is determined... by forces over which we have no control."
Albert Einstein
Heck, Gilbert and Sullivan knew that by instinct in 1873.
"Every boy and every girl,
that is born into the world alive,
is either a little liberal,
or a little conservative."
Iolanthe
It has since been confirmed with studies on separated identical twins. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, was determined from our taste in beer and wives to toothpaste, pets, political tendencies, belief or not in a Creator etc. etc. The question we should be asking is what hasn't been prescribed. I have no idea. Does anyone?
What really grinds me is the silly insistence that Darwinism is synonymous with evolution. An undeniable past evolution WAS reproductive continuity with progressive change. Darwinism, based as it is on random mutation and natural selection, never had anything to do with evolution which isn't going on any more anyway. How wrong can an hypothesis be I wonder.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
Gee whiz folks, Gilbert and Sullivan in 1873 anticipated the the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis six years before Einstein was even born (1879). It seems to me that the Darwinists are frightfully slow on the uptake.
Of course it is really not their fault as Einstein explained:
"Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their thinking, feeling, and acting are not free but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
Address to The Spinoza Society of America, September 22, 1932.
Mathew
It is considered bad form for a scientist to ask the question why. He is only supposed to ask how. Unfortunately we do not know how the universe was created. The Big Bangers think they know but I am still skeptical. Getting something from nothing I find a little troublesome.
Being an experimental scientist by nature and experience, I tend to avoid philosophical questions such as the one you raise. As a physiologist I am interested in how things work. Since Darwinism doesn't work I have abandoned it and sought other explanations and recently published my thesis in the form of the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis which I feel is in complete accord with what we REALLY know about the mechanism of organic evolution. I really don't know what else to say. Thanks for posting.
Gee whiz!
I hope this silence doesn't mean that no one is interested in how many times life was created. That is a very important question and I have some pretty persuasive things to offer up. Besides, I like to try my heresies out in public before submitting them for publication. Before proceeding with the next installment I would like to hear what others think about how many times life was created. It WAS created you know. It sure didn't happen by accident or are there some who think it may have? Don't be shy. God knows I'm not. That is what this blog is all about. Let's get it on. I'm so bored (Churchill's last words). I know what he meant.
And so to bed.
I see that P.Z. Meyers over at Panda's Thumb is all upset about losing Kansas. He is concerned that doubt is being cast on the "theory of evolution." P.Z. should realize that there is no "theory of evolution." Theories are verified hypotheses and such do not yet exist. Furthermore, evolution is not a theoretical matter as it is a demonstrated matter of undeniable reality. The only real issue is the means by which it WAS effected. P.Z. confuses evolution with the Darwinian version of the mechanism by which it took place. I am also confident that he thinks it is in progress right now as well, even though there is not a scintilla of evidence for such a proposition.
My position, like that of Grasse and Broom is that it is no longer in progress and, like that of Schindewolf, Osborn, Berg and Punnett, never had anything to do with Natural Selection and like that of Grasse and Goldschmidt, never had anything to do with allelic mutation. To that I have added, with Schindewolf and Grasse, that the entire phenomenon has been purely emergent and proceeded entirely independent of the environment based on internal factors exactly as ontogeny goes forth today.There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the Darwinian model that has, and of course had, anything to do with creative evolution. The entire Darwinian scheme is an illusion based on the unfounded assumption that if something is there it is and was there because Nature allowed it to be there. Everything that was and is still is because it was determined eons ago that was the only way that evolution could conceivably proceed. I am now convinced that the entire scenario has been realized and terminated and we are now in the downhill phase of an immense phenomenon which can never be repeated.
I take exception with Otto Schindewolf when he insisted that evolution is indefinitely cyclic. It is no more cyclic than is the development of the individual from a fertilized egg. Ontogeny and phylogeny are both self-limited, auto-regulated, goal-directed, internally controlled phenomena of which only ontogeny continues. Just as ontogeny terminates with the death of the individual, so phylogeny terminates with the extinction of its products which is all that we see at present. The parallels are virtually perfect and ontogeny is the best model for evolution.
Maybe this harangue will serve to stimulate a response of some sort but I wouldn't bet on it.
"Aren't we witnessing the remains of an immense phenomenon close to extinction? Aren't the small variations which are being recorded everywhere the tail end, the last oscillations of the evolutionary movement?
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, page 71
Please note the apparent contradiction between Grasse's conclusions and the title of his book.
also:
"A cluster of facts makes it very plain that Mendelian, allelomorphic mutation plays no role in creative evolution. It is, as it were, a more or less pathological fluctuation in the genetic code. It is an accident on the 'magnetic tape' on which THE PRIMARY INFORMATION IS RECORDED."
ibid, page 243, (my emphasis)
" It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for believing it to be true."
Bertrand Russell
I made a booboo. My last quotation from Grasse should read -THE PRIMARY INFORMATION FOR THE SPECIES IS RECORDED. Sorry about that.
Phil,
Thanks for posting. You ask when will the madness end? I am not sure it ever will. We deal here with fundamental differences in the way we view the world which I believe are rigidly fixed in our genome or, if I may use the term, "prescribed." I know that doen't sound right but I have no other explanation. There is also the problem of pride. Does anyone really expect those who have dedicated their professional lives to a phantom to easily come to grips with just that? Yet that is exactly what the situation boils down to. Can you imagine Dawkins conceding that everything he has ever written is meaningless drivel? In a way it is a blessing that Gould and Mayr were spared that realization but I am have no compassion for Dawkins whatsoever. It will be interesting to see how he responds to the inevitable. We shouldn't have to wait much longer.
As for Eldredge, he has little choice as he has a long paper trail of Darwinian zealousness which he can hardly abandon without some embarrassment.
Compare Eldredge's position with that of another drector of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn:
"In all the research since 1869 on the transformations observed in closely successive phyletic series no evidence whatever, to my knowledge, has been brought forward by any paleontologist, either of the vertebrated or invertebrated animals, that the fit originates by selection from the fortuitous."
Published in 1909 and quoted in Leo Berg's Nomogenesis, page127
It is hard to believe isn't it?
Well I guess nobody wants to hear about how many times life may or may not have been created. That is too bad. I may present that evidence anyway. For the moment let me explain how I intend to go about it. As long as there exists simple criteria sufficient to account for a common ancestor, one can assume that such an ancestor existed. However, even that may not be so because it is possible that organisms which share a common genetic background may have independently aquired that condition through separate and independent evolutionary events. That is to say that evolution may have been repeatable. I do not favor this view but it cannot be eliminated at present.
Here is an example of what I mean. There is powerful evidence that the genera Homo (man). Pan (chimpanzee), Gorilla (gorilla) and Pongo (orang) are all related and accordingly had a common ancestor. That evidence includes anatomical correspondence, DNA homology and, most important, chromosomal structure. All three of these criteria place chimpanzee as our closest relative with the other two more distant. We differ from the chimp by about twelve chromosomal rearrangements from which one can estimate that approximately that number of discrete ancestors have come and gone in the period between the appearance of the chimp and that of man. Man (Homo sapiens) is very recent with no evidence indicating his presence until about 100,000 years ago. In my opinion our ancestor was Neanderthal for the simple reason there was no other candidate present at the time we showed up. Of course that may not be true but at present there is no evidence to indicate otherwise and we sure were not produced de novo.
Now how far can one extend the chromosomal structural evidence indicating a common ancestor? Apparently, from the information now available, as far as to include very possibly all the living represntatives of the order Primates. Presently disclosed chromosomal homolgy would indicate that at least for the past 20 million years evoluition in the primates has proceeded largely if not exclusively by the restructuring of a common source of evolutionary information, a source for which there is no necessity to postulate any input from mutation and natural selection.
Needless to say, this presents tangible support for the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis (PEH, which proposes that evolution has been largely, if not entirely, emergent and independent of envronmental influence.
Naturally I am as pleased as punch with these findings from the chromosome studies which also find agreement in the antiquity of many gene families.
In subsequent installments I will consider how much further we can extend a common chromosomal structural heritage to account for common ancestry. For the moment let me say that we are soon going to encounter some difficulties.
In the meantime consider the following:
"However that may be, the existence of internal factors affecting evolution has to be accepted by ANY OBJECTIVE MIND..."
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, page 209 (my emphasis)
This raises an interesting question. Is the Darwinian mind objective? I'll let others answer that question as I have already made up my mind that it very definitely is not.
As davescot discovered, John Rennie has abandoned SciAm Perspectives and moved on to SciAm Observations. At the new blog, one cannot comment. All one finds are trackbacks so, in effect, it is no longer a forum.
Forunately, the old forum is still there and I invite all to examine the last several threads there to find that about a dozen of them terminated with my unanswered comments and challenges. This constitutes a beautiful demonstration of how one Darwinian has decided to deal with one skeptic. He has found it necessary to abandon all communication for 3 months, change the blogs name, move to a new location and eliminate comments from the format.
If someone wants to take the trouble you will find that I left the terminal comment on eleven or twelve of the last several threads posted at SciAm Perspectives. I recommend it as proof that we critics of the Darwinian fairy tale are simply not allowed to exist.
Apparently it is impossible for Rennie to erase what transpired at his earlier forum, a virtue of the world wide web. In any event, I am flattered. even delighted, to have received what seems to me to be such special attention. Read and enjoy and reach your own conclusions. I have already reached mine.
Thanks for the information dave.
It's hard to believe isn't it?
Isn't non-existence a wonderful thing? You don't have to take any crap from anyone because you don't exist. How very convenient. Actually, it is nothing more than a cowardly, ideologically driven cop out.
The silence with which the Darwinians have always responded to their critics is self-explanatory. They cannot respond because they know in their heart of hearts that they are full of it right up to the gunwales. H.M.S. Darwin was sunk by St George Jackson Mivart in 1871, by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1909, by William Bateson in 1913, by Reginald C. Punnett in 1915, by Leo S. Berg in 1922, by Richard B. Goldschmidt in 1940, by Otto Schindewolf in 1936 and again in 1950, by Pierre Grasse in 1973 and by myself first in 1984 and several more times since. Even the Darwinian's own Julian Huxley, author of "Evolution: The Modern Synthesis," sank it with a single paragraph in 1942 as I recently demonstrated.
All we see is a bunch of Darwinian fanatics still blindly clutching the flotsam and jetsam left from the wreck of the good ship Darwin, the most infantile concept ever dreamed up by the human imagination. It dwarfs both the Phlogiston of Chemistry and the Ether of Physics.
I feel somewhat better now that I have vented ever so slightly. It is too bad no one can hear me. Darwinians have serious sensory difficulties don't you know. Don't take my word for it.
"Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics and it springs from the same source...They are creatures that CANNOT HEAR the music of the spheres."
Albert Einstein, (my emphasis)
What did I tell you? God but it is great fun having ones own blog.
As I used to say over at Panda's Thumb before they finally banned me for life, one of my more glorious achievements:
"How do you like them apples?"
Thank you teleologist. My quotes are simply to give credit where it is due. I am the dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. As Robert Burton said and I used as a frontispiece to my Manifesto:
"A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see father than a giant himself."
The other one I used there was from Thomas Carlyle and it is just as appropriate to the situation that still prevails:
"No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men."
Thanks for posting.
At EvC I was banned for life on the basis of three innocuous little words which I repeated, apparently, once too often. They were:
"Who is next?"
I repeat them here, especially for the Darwinians:
"Who is next?"
When I was a child we used to play hide and seek and I vividly recall that expression:
"Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
Well, come out! I'll leave a light on for you.
"There is no wild guess about the hundreds of thousands of species that have become extinct in the past century."
Well then, perhaps you can point me to the experiments which verified that all these supposed species couldn't interbreed with any living species and thus demonstrate they were really distinct species.
I shan't hold my breath waiting for the experimental verfication behind your claim as I'm quite sure it doesn't exist.
"Any idea why would BFL create a universe?"
Boredom is my guess.
Imagine knowing everything that's going to happen before it happens. That would suck.
I think the BFL needed some spice in its life so it created a deterministic universe that eventually and inevitably produced intelligent creatures with non-deterministic free will.
davescot
You are asking me for experimental proof that long dead species cannot interbreed with living ones?
Surely you jest.
Do you really believe there has been no extinction of true species in the past 150 years? As John McEnroe used to say all the time - Surely you can't be serious. I am beginning to wonder about your objectivity. Do you think the tens of millions of passenger pigeons that used to darken the skies were the same species as the ones that now dirty up our city parks? How about the Dodo, the Tasmanian Wolf and all those poor flightless birds that our cats wiped out wherever they found them? Somebody pinch me please. This cannot be!
We are right now witnessing the greatest mass extinction that ever occurred on this planet. At 20,000 per annum and a reasonable estimate of 10,000,000 true species both plant and animal, my little solar powered Casio comes up with the number 500, that is years, folks. What do you get?
Of course that is ridiculous. At the rate we are going we won't last another hundred years unless we mend our ways and darn soon.
True speciation and the formation of the higher taxonomic categories finished long ago. We are now on the terminal downhill slipper slope. Schindewolf, commmenting on the several evolutionary cycles that have occurred coined three terms to describe those cycles, TYPOGENESIS, which referred to the origin of a new evolutionary group, TYPOSTASIS, which referred to its long period of relative stability and TYPOLYSIS which referred to the period of decline which ended with extinction. Many animal and plant groups have demonstrated these three phases and are no longer extant. The problem now is that TYPOGENESIS is no longer in progress. Evolution has fully run its course and will never restart. Of that I am certain and I defy anyone to provide evidence that I am wrong.
Anyone who chooses to ignore the reality of our present condition is living in a fantasy world of denial. If someone wants to chime in on this most important topic, please do.
I'll leave a light on for you.
Thanks for posting.
Hey davescot, you are supposed to respond with - "And don't call me Shirley."
In the immortal words of Jackie Gleason:
"Ooooh, how sweet it is!
Let us blog, shall we?
Davescot
I have a favor to ask. Since Dembski has banned me from Uncommon Descent would you inform the troops over there that I now have a blog? Also why do they keep describing Intelligent Design as anti-evolutionary? If there HAD BEEN no Intelligent Design (past tense again) there wouldn't have been any evolution. ID and evolution are one and the same.
Of course if you don't agree with this you probably won't want to do as I request but I really have no other choice since I am incommunicado with the leadership of both sides of this silly debate, a debate that never should have existed. So far, Phil Engle's forum is the only one I know of with a link to this blog. I still don't know how to make links but I have a friend who is going to show me how. There are darn few forums that I would care to link to anyway. Thanks in advance and keep on posting please. It gets lonely when you don't exist as this blog testifies.
I answered the next on my site "Research on Intelligent Design":
Dr. Davison,
Thank you for your kind invitation.
Even if we don't agree in everything that you say or write, your observations of a similar caliber as Denton's, are not to be lightly dismissed and I have featured them elsewhere:
Some of Dr. John A. Davison's Striking Observations.
Dr. Davison, can you be considered a Theoretical Researcher on Intelligent Design or an independent sympathizer of ID?
Maybe like Art Battson's observations, compatible but independent of ID, as his conference (in RealPlayer) indicates: "On the Theory of Conservation".
fdocc
Thank you very much. You ask what I am and what I think I am. I am a retired bench physiologist who is interested in what can be and has been proved experimentally. I have always avoded identifying myself with a particular group as I feel one loses part of ones perspective when that happens. The various groups and sects have also not extended many invitations that I can recall. Quite the contrary as I am sure you are aware. Your forum is a notable exception and I appreciate that. At least you haven't found it necessary to ban me yet.
I was aware of your summary of many of my published observations on evolution and I appreciate the publicity that represents. As someone said - "any publicity is good publicity." As far as I know yours has been entirely favorable.
For purposes of useful discussion I am particularly interested in what it is with which you do NOT agree and of course why. Would you please clarify that statement? I think I might know but I don't choose to make any assumptions and in so doing misrepresent you or your core beliefs. I am a great believer in the written word and its significance, especially when it is in hard copy in books and refereed journals.
Thank you again for your input and, as I have posted on your forum, I hope you will continue to post here.
jad
"You are asking me for experimental proof that long dead species cannot interbreed with living ones? Surely you jest."
Don't call me shirley. Coming up with experimental evidence of wild extrapolations can be damned inconvenient can't it? Just ask the Darwimps how inconvenient it is if you don't believe me.
Yes of course I'm asking for experimental evidence that 20,000 species are going extinct every year. Why on earth wouldn't I ask for scientific evidence from a scientist? If you were a Darwimp I'd just pat you on the head and say "That's nice. Would you like cookies and milk now?"
"Do you really believe there has been no extinction of true species in the past 150 years?"
No and that's a straw man. I said one could reasonably expect that when number of living species is near a historic high there would also be a high rate of extinctions merely because there are more candidates around to die off. The rule is that species eventually go extinct. If there's more of them alive at one time there's more of them becoming extinct at one time.
What I want is something more than alarmist hand waving about the magnitude of the decline in total number and the first thing I want is some kind of evidence that it's actually distinct species going extinct and not just sub-species. I suspect the vast majority of the claim is sub-species that don't meet the physiological definition of species.
"Do you think the tens of millions of passenger pigeons that used to darken the skies were the same species as the ones that now dirty up our city parks?"
That's one. Only 19,999 species to go for the year the last passenger pigeon died. Good luck.
"How about the Dodo, the Tasmanian Wolf and all those poor flightless birds that our cats wiped out wherever they found them?"
19,996 - you better move a bit faster or computers will be extinct before you finish blogging the first year's worth of extinctions.
"Evolution has fully run its course and will never restart. Of that I am certain and I defy anyone to provide evidence that I am wrong."
I defy you to provide evidence that supports certainty in your conclusion. I will concede that evolution beyond sub-species MAY be stopped. It may also be that we just can't observe it in working over timescales less than thousands or millions of years and/or over only a tiny fraction of the biosphere.
"I have a favor to ask."
I'll work it in. I've linked twice on Dembski's blog to your evolutionary manifesto at uvm.edu in the past week. Put a link to your manifesto on your blog front page and I'll link to it instead of uvm.edu. How's that sound?
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, there's far more of Davison's scientific assertions that I'm in agreement with than otherwise. I consider his evolutinary manifesto to be the best evoluntionary hypothesis in the marketplace.
davescot
Thanks for posting. I am sorry you question the mass extinction. All I can say is that you are wrong and I can only hope that someone else might see fit to agree with me.
You also seem to be operating under the mistaken Darwinian notion that evolution WAS a gradual process. It IS finished you know but of course you won't agree with that either I guess.
That is fine too.
There is no such thing as a gradual genetic change. All such changes are instantaneous and without intermediate states. There is absolutely nothing in the fossil record to support gradual changes with one exception. The vast majority of fossil species appeared, flourished and disappeared without intervening changes in their morphology. While it is true that many lines underwent changes they were always discrete, dramatic and unmistakable. We don't even know which forms were ancestral to which in such lines because the changes were so profound at each step. The horse series is a good example. Each member of that sequence differed from the others so much that each had to be assigned to a new genus. The history of the fossil record is the history of profound interruptions. This exactly what one would expect if new forms appeared as the result of a dramatic restructuring of a preexisting chromosomal source of information. Such transformations are going to affect many many features simultaneously.
The one possible exception which I mentioned is related to Schindewolf's TYPOLYSIS phase of the evolutionary cycle. Many forms illustrate, as tney approach extinction, bizarre morphological developments which often prove not to be adaptive. It is well illustrated with the dinosaurs and several invertebrate lines. Since these developments occured over time we cannot be sure exactly how they they were connected reproductively since there is no way to test that. Some of them do seem to have been gradual however. That is the only place where I can conceive of gradualism in the evolutionary record. Every genetic change from a simple mutation to the formation of species, genera orders and on up the ladder were instantaneous events and unambiguous in their significance. That is what makes the Linnaean system so workable. Schindewoldf put it very well when he said, and I paraphrase:
"We might as well stop looking for the missing links as they never existed."
I refer you to my published paper "The Case for Instant Evolution," Rivista di Biologia /Biology Forum, 96: 203-206, 2003.
The referees at Rivista were so upset with it that they refused to publish the conclusion section which was fine with me anyway so they presented it, with my blessing, as a letter to the editor. The conclusions were self-evident anyway. You won't even find it on the list of papers in that issue. The important thing is that it is now preserved for eternity of the shelves of the world's libararies which is all that really matters. I think you can find the unexpurgated version at ISCID's "brainstorms" forum in their Archives and other places on the web. Most of my papers are available online. Discovery Institute even reprinted the unexpurgated version without my permission which didn't please me very much. Like Rodney Dangerfield, I get no respect!
So you see even Rivista finds me unacceptable. I am as pleased as punch and wouldn't have it any other way.
Gradual evolution is about as likely as gradual pregancy, in other words inconceivable. In physiology it is called the "all-or-none law."
"Everything is determined... by forces over which we have no control."
Albert Einstein
and as far as our difference of interpretation are concerned:
"Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their thinking, feeling, and acting are not free but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
ibid
We are all victims of a "prescribed evolution."
Thanks for posting.
With respect to the substance of my last post in response to davescot let me offer up the following challenges.
1. Pick any two species, living or dead, and show me the evidence that one of them is ancestral to the other.
2. Provide me with evidence for the emergence of any true species in historical times along with the parental species from which it was derived.
Since these questions have remained unanswered I have concluded, naturally enough, that speciation and the formation of any of the higher taxonomic categories is no longer in progress: in short that evolution is finished. In so doing I have done nothing more than to agree with the conclusions of three distinguished biologists, Robert Broom, Pierre Grasse and, of all people, the author of "Evolution: The Modern Synthesis," Julian Huxley.
There is a great old popular ballad from the past with the title: "Don't Blame Me." For those with musical interests it goes this way in 4.
G, Bflat, A, G,/ F, F, F, E, G, D,
C,/ F, F, F, E, D,/ G, G, G, F, E,/ A, A C. The first three and last three notes of the score are sung as "Don't Blame Me." I think I have that right. Of course there is a lot more to it than that. It is a great old tune and I play it frequently when I get accused of presenting what seem to some to be idiotic ideas.
"No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men."
Thomas Carlyle
This is not the first time I have presented these challenges. So far they remain unanswered.
Isn't anyone going to support my contention that we are witnessing an enormous extinction, one of the greatest in the history of the planet? Am I alone here? It seems that way. Unlike some blogs, I welcome response, positive or negative. Don't disappoint me.
In case anyone is interested, I am now holding forth with gay abandon over at "Teleological Blog" forum. Jump in. The waters fine.
Dr. Davison,
I'm glad to see you at "teleological.org" with your first delivery:
"Is evolution finished?"
The purpose of my original question is to ask you if I can freely feature you or not in my blog on
"Research on Intelligent Design"?
fdocc
Of course you may. Thanks for asking first.
The folks at Discovery Institute never bothered but went right ahead with the unexpurgated version of "Is evolution finished?" which didn't please me very much, especially since I am not a member of Discovery Institute. I do not belong to any organization, not even the AARP. I am scared to death of becoming identified with any organization for fear it might rub off on me. I greatly value my independence. I think it may be part of my "prescribed" providence.
You may reprint either version with my blessing. Any publicity is good publicity don't you know?
Thanks for posting.
Paul Yost alias The Great Society has just informed us all in no uncertain terms that life originated only once. Write that down folks and remember it.
Thanks for posting, Paul Yost and straightening us all out on that very important point. Perhaps you would like to tell us just how that life was created. Was it by any chance an accident? Don't be shy.
Incidentally, Paul Yost and frank are both assistant managers at FrngeSciences forum, that epitome of civility and objectivity from which I naturally have been banned for life. That may explain their willingness to post here. I have no intention of banning anyone even if I could. I believe in giving evry person every opportunity to make a perfect damn fool of himself if he should choose to do so. It is the American way.
As I used to say over at EvC before Percy couldn't take it any more and banned me for life - Who is next?
How about hearing from P.Z. Meyers of Pharyngula and Panda's Thumb fame both of which forums have also banned me for life. P.Z. Meyers is the one who greeted me with "Your stench has preceded you." Isn't that precious? Then of course he banned me so I couldn't respond. He is a real class act don't you know?
"War, God help me, I love it so!"
General George S. Patton, a fellow predestinationist.
Incidentally, the date for the last three or four posts is November 17, 2005.
"All I can say is that you are wrong and I can only hope that someone else might see fit to agree with me."
I guess it was too much to ask that you provide more evidence for 20,000 annual extinctions of extinct species than to name the passenger pigeon, dodo, and tasmanian wolf. I was even kind enough to immediately subtract those from 20,000 leaving you only 19,996 to go for your first year of extinctions. I kindly did not ask for evidence that they're all indeed dead and they're all indeed distinct species that cannot produce a fertile hybrid with any living species. How much more accomodating can I possibly be? Do you really expect me to just roll over and concede 2,000,000 extinctions in the last century when you've only provided me with 3 examples?
"You also seem to be operating under the mistaken Darwinian notion that evolution WAS a gradual process."
I'm not convinced either way. Certainly sub-species can be generated slowly. You don't get a chihuahua from a wolf in a single generation but you can in many generations.
davescot
Thanks for posting. I thought I had made it clear that 20,000 per annum was an estimate and not firmly established. The estimates are all over the place which shouldn't surprise anyone but to question, as you did, that mass extinction is not in progress I find very difficult to understand. The very concept of species implies separation and reproductive isolation which you also seem to ignore.
The history of life on this planet has always been a balance between the evolution of new species and the extinction of those previously evolved. That balance has been seriously disturbed by man. Furthermore, there is no proof that evolution is even occurring any more. I still await proof for speciation in historical times. I require no proof for mass extinction in that same period. It is self-evident. It is a virtue to be skeptical but I find your position without foundation. When the evolution of new species cannot be demonstrated during an interval when they are disappearing at an alarming rate it doesn't take a rocket scientist to draw the ominous conclusion that we are in a crisis. If you cannot recognize that there is little I can do for you. Consider the following from Leakey's "The Sixth Extinction, page 67
"With at least 15 percent, and as many as 95 percent of species wiped out, ecological niches are opened, or at least made much less crowded that they once were. It is time of evolutionary opportunity offered to a lucky few."
Sure it is and where are the replacements? The answer is transparent. They do not and most probably will never exist.
My model for phylogeny (evolution) is the development of the individual (ontogeny). Both are governed by front-loaded predetermined instructions the origin for which remain unknown. Both are irreversible. The individual dies never to be replaced and so does the species. The latter is extinction which is the primary event we now witness. To assume that a new period of creative evolution is in the future is without any justification whatsoever. It is only wishful thinking.
In other posts I have presented here and elsewhere I have asked for evidence that a new genus has appeared in the last two million years and any new mammalian species has appeared since the emergence of Homo sapiens in the last 100,000 years. Those questions remain ignored and unanswered. Until I see evidence to the contrary I will continue to remain convinced that just as ontogeny is a self-limited sequence ending in the death of the individual, so has been phylogeny, ending with the ultimate death of the species. I am convinced the scenario has been fully realized and is now completely finished. Others may disagree but until evidence surfaces to the contrary I remain resolute in my conclusions right along with Robert Broom, Pierre Grasse and, of all people, Julian Huxley, the man who introduced the term "The Modern Synthesis."
No species ever evolved gradually, evolution never occurred through Natural Selection and obligatory sexual reproduction is impotent as a creative evolutionary device. Furthermore, I have already committed these conclusions to hard copy as is obvious to anyone who is interested enough to inquire. Does anyone really expect me to abandon my conclusions just because they are not accepted by the establishment or by certain contributors to this blog? Not a chance folks. Prove I am wrong. That is what science is all about.
"Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don't ever apologize for anything."
Harry S. Truman
"I never did give them hell. they just thought it was hell."
ibid
"Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day."
ibid
My kind of guy
Thanks for posting.
I notice that Paul Yost, aka TGS which stands for The Great Society over at his home base, FringeSciences, wants to know how long his two posts here will be allowed to stand. I would respond there but I am banned. For a long time I couldn't even view that pig sty.
Paul, you can rest assured that both of your posts will stand here for as long as this blog exists as will any other messages you choose to leave here. I firmly believe in the right of every citizen to make a perfect fool of himself if he chooses to do so. It is the American way don't you know.
Wasn't The Great Society the slogan of Lyndon Johnson?
Thanks for posting.
Frankpassman
Your leader at FringeSciences, one "SwiftWindHorse" (isn't that quaint) made it very plain that I would never ever be allowed to post at his blog again which was music to my ears. Don't try to rewrite history. I know better. I am not interested in using this blog to discuss the Dover trial. Find somewhere else to discuss that. Got that? Write that down.
This is for renniem aka murray over at FringeSciences.
Yes I do read FS. Now if you choose to make disparaging remarks about me come over here to my blog and make them where I can respond to you. Most of you guys at FS can't post anywhere else since you have been banned at most decent forums. Well you are welcome here. Paul Yost, aka The Great Society (TGS) and frank have both posted here. Come vent, insult and deprecate to your hearts content. You may even choose to comment on the thrust of this blog which is that speciation and the formation of any of the higher categories never had anything to do with natural selection or the environment beyond acting as a stimulus or with allelic mutation, was driven entirely by internal forces, was preprogrammed from the beginning or beginnings and is in all probability finished. In other words as the subject of this blog suggests, creative evolution was, in a word, - "prescribed."
To this I might add that natural selection, the cornerstone of the Darwinian fairy tale, now as in the past, is entirely anti-evolutionary, serving only to delay the inevitable which is extinction.
How do you like them apples? I look forward to your constructive input.
Does anyone have Niles Eldredge's email address. I want to invite him to participate.
I see things are slowing down some. We can't have that you know, so to liven things up a bit I just posted a pretty good antiDarwinian zinger (if I may say so) over at Phil Engle's new forum "Evolution and NonLinear Science" on the "Dover is over" thread. Read and enjoy and consider it as if I had posted it right here. After you have thoroughly digested it and you still feel up to it respond either here or there. Let's get this show on the road.
I am also lecturing in a fairly empty auditorium at "teleological blog" forum and being thoroughly ignored, as usual, at ISCID's "brainstorms." It is a pale shadow of its former self.
I keep telling everyone that we critics of the big bad Darwinian toothless tiger simply are not allowed to exist. I hope that some are beginning to believe me.
Hey folks, I just got my copy of Discover magazine and "discovered" in it a wonderful piece about "Sir" Richard Dawkins if you can imagine such a thing. The quintessential atheist Darwinian, Dawkins has recently been slugging it out with a Catholic Darwinist, Ken Miller. Not satisfied that they both have rejected order and purpose in the universe, they find it now necessary to attack one another. I love it so! What more could a man ask for?
Dawkins is frightfully obsessed with Einstein whom he regards as the perfect model for what a scientist should be. Unfortunately he seems unaware of Einstein's real position with respect to atheism, theism and science.
"Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics and it springs from the same source....They are creatures who cannot hear the music of the spheres."
Richard Dawkins is a living example of my Prescribed Evolution. He is nothing but a pawn, a helpless creature doomed to ultimate and early extinction.
Like Gould, Mayr and Provine before him, Dawkins is not a scientist. He never did an experiment in his life and neither did the others. We have been dominated all too long by clever wordsmiths, firmly ensconsed in their endowed chairs at Oxford, Harvard, Cornell and elsewhere, cranking out literally meter after meter of library shelf science fiction to a gullible, naive, vulnerable, ill educated, uncritical audience many of whom are freely continuing that tradition right here on the web.
I am thoroughly delighted with the way this is all shaking out. If I can just stop slapping my thigh long enough in joyous glee, I may attempt to communicate my reactions in a letter to Discovery magazine which I can guarantee in advance they will never publish.
In the meantime let me quote Montaigne:
"We seek and offer ourselves to be gulled."
God but I am having fun. How about the rest of you?
Keep on posting!
Excuse the typo folks. It is of course Discover not Discovery magazine.
Well come on folks. Surely someone out there in cyberspace has something to offer pro or con. I don't wnt this blog to be just a sound board for my own heresies. I want to be attacked, exposed as a fool and put out of my intellectual misery. All I ask is that it be done in a civil fashion. This is a golden opportunity for those who do not agree with me. I don't even know how to delete anything that is posted here. Dawkins is calling for an open discussion too. Why not have him start right here I say. I would love to take him on. I think I will invite him.
I invited Dawkins to participate here and elsewhere on the internet. For those who might be interested, his Oxford email address is:
richard.dawkins@new.ox.ac.uk
I hope everyone will read the Discover piece about Dawkins, "Darwin's Rottweiler."
You will notice that he feels he has the "better product to sell." and wants to engage in open discussion. Accordingly, I wrote a letter to Discover inviting Dawkins and all others to visit my blog or other forums on the internet and present their "products" for open discussion. It sure can't be done in the professional (refereed) literature at present. I can only hope they will publish it but they probably won't.
Since nothing is happening in response to my challenges, I will continue in what unfortunately seems to be becoming a monologue. That is not my fault as I have done everything in my power to excite responses.
So I will return to the Discover article about Dawkins appropriately entitled "Darwin's Rottweiler." Thomas Henry Huxley was called "Darwin's Bulldog" of course. But let us compare Huxley with Dawkins for a moment. Huxley never embraced Darwinism the way Dawkins has. For example it was Huxley who said:
"Science commits suicide when she adopts a creed."
That statement attributed to Huxley is the only frontispiece
to Leo Berg's "Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law," in my opinion the single most significant evolutionary book ever published.
Dawkins of course speaks as the consummate atheist, denying any role for a Creator past or present, although he seems to be hedging a little nowadays when he is turning to Einstein as his model.
Compare Dawkins with Huxley again:
"Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demontrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God."
Dawkins seems to belong to the latter camp.
Huxley's view is remarkably similar to that presented by Einstein:
"Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and it stems from the same source... They are creatures who can't hear the music of the spheres."
My own view is that there is no God as IT or THEY were consumed in the act or acts of creation. But I find it quite impossible to deny that such elements of unfathomable intelligence once existed. That is the entire thrust of the PEH. I agree entirely with Leo Berg, who, commenting on phylogeny and ontogeny said:
"Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance."
Nomogenesis, page 134.
In any event, it will be interesting to see if Discover magazine publishes my letter in response to the Dawkins piece and just as important, will Dawkins enter into a free exchange of ideas as he claims he wants to do. I can't imagine a more approporiate venue than the internet and blogs like this one. Come one - come all.
Don't just sit there. Say something!
To date, the only blog I know of that has linked to this one is Phil Engle's Evolution and NonLinear Science. As soon as I learn how to make links I will link to any blog that links to this one. It takes two to tango don't you know.
I notice that the "bathroom wall" over at Panda's Thumb has had no activity since August 18th. It now presents a 100% Darwinian front having finally squelched all criticism of the great myth. That is a beautiful thing don't you know. It has become the Alamo of neo-Darwinism. Circle them there wagons Welsbery. Geronimo!
Excuse me. I inadvertantly slipped. I used to refer to him as Esley Welsberry. His real name is Wesley Elsberry of course. I promised myself I wouldn't do that any more but I goofed.
drc
I am hardly an atheist. I am convinced that one or more Gods definitely existed and wrote the programs for all of evolution. What I have said is that I see no evidence that God exists at present and I know of no evidence to support that contention. Perhaps others do. I suppose my position, like Einstein's, would be that of an agnostic. That term, which was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, has always confused me somewhat, because if one does not know one surely does not believe. It strikes me as almost identical with atheist. In any event I can hardly be described as an atheist when the entire Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis (PEH)is predicated on an intelligence far beyond our ability even to comprehend. Like Pierre Grasse I see no need for an intervening God but that one or more such entities once existed seems to me unavoidable.
Thanks for posting.
"Let us not invoke God in realities in which He NO LONGER HAS TO INTERVENE.The single absolute act of creation was enough for Him."
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, page 166, (his emphasis)
Let me add that I am not at all certain that there was a single act of creation and neither am I sure of the gender of the Big Front Loader (BFL) or their numbers. My prejudice is that there were at least two, one malevolent, one benevolent.
Thanks for posting.
Well let's see, where do we stand here now? In one more attempt to evoke some kind of reaction from the Darwinian faction, let me once again state my convictions.
1. Creative evolution is a thing of the past without a new genus in 2 million years and a new species in historical times. This must be slightly modified by saying with some certainty that, if those events have occurred, they most certainly did not result from obligatory sexual reproduction.
2. Sexual (Mendelian) devices are much too conservative to ever have played a role in creative evolution (true speciation and the formation of any of the higher taxonomic categories).
3. The much heralded Natural Selection of Darwinism is a myth and an illusion as far as evolution is concerned. Natural Selection is very real but its role is now and always was to prevent change rather than to produce it as was recognized long ago by Leo Berg, William Bateson, Henry Fairfield Osborn, St George Jackson Mivart and Reginald C. Punnett. In so doing it was essential in causing extinction, thus paving the way for new life forms to succeed the old.
4. Allelic mutation has never played a role in speciation or the formation of any of the higher categories. In other words, Mendelism has played no role whatsoever in creative evolution. William Bateson recognized that long ago and so did Pierre Grasse. That is why they both have been ignored.
5. Finally, having of necessity abandoned the Darwinian scheme entirely, there remains only one remaining explanation for organic evolution. It has resulted largely if not entirely from endogenous emergent factors for which the environment played no role except that of provoking an inner latent potential. In short macroevolution WAS (since it is no longer in progress) largely if not entirely predetermined by means which as yet are undisclosed. In other words organic evolution was "prescribed."
Now surely all do not accept this admittedly heretical version of the great mystery of phylogeny which incidentally applies equally to ontogeny. I invite those with other views to present them in open dialogue, each to defend his thesis with documented facts. It is crunch time for Darwinian materialism and for Lamarckism too. Let's get this problem out in the open and try to resolve it once and for all. That is what this blog is for. Now don't disappoint me.
I'll leave a light on for you.
Melvin H. Fox
Thank you for posting. The vehicle for carrying the information is the same vehicle that carries all the information necessary to form a unique human being from a single cell, the fertilized egg. Ontogeny and phylogeny are part of the same reproductive continuum and undoubtedly share many of the same devices. I would assume the vehicle has been the material contained in the nucleus, chromosomes, composed of DNA, histones and all the other components of the genetic material.
I realize the PEH seems highly improbable to some but one has to ask the question as I have, - is there any other explanation? When both Lamarckism and Darwinism have failed to account for the great mystery of evolution as all of my sources have claimed, we have the responsibility as scientists to recognize what I personally regard as the only alternative. The PEH is built on a solid framework of real science as it is now being disclosed by studies in molecular biology, chromosome physiology and above all, the undeniable reality of the fossil record. Any evolutionary hypothesis must conform to these disciplines and their revelations. I sincerely believe that the PEH is in concert with everything we really know about evolution. I am fully prepared to defend it here or in the professional literature as soon as I am challenged which seems to be the problem. Like my preedecessors who supplied the raw material for this hypothesis, I too am being ignored by what must be described as "the establishment."
Even if the PEH should prove to be seriously flawed, which I do not anticipate, it will in no way detract from the dismal failure of the Darwinian myth. I have been publishing papers in refereed journals now for a half century, and I have yet to retract anything I ever comitted to the permanence of the library shelf. In my opinion I will never have to.
Thanks again for posting.
"Here I stand. I can do no otherwise."
Martin Luther
"I never did give them hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell."
Harry Truman
"Meine Zeit wird schon kommen!
Gregor Mendel
Today, Tuesday, November 22, fdocc over at "Research on Intelligent Design" introduced the very lengthy thread "John A. Davison and the discrete nature and stability of species."
I am of course very pleased at this very competent summary of my position with respect to the great mystery of organic evolution.I recommend it to all as it represents one of the few places where my several papers have been recognized. I of course am delighted. Who wouldn't be? Things are looking up or at least I like to think so.
Dr. Davison,
Yes, I have learned a lot from your postings, comments, articles, etc.
I am very thankful with your work, that’s why I posted the review that you mention, John A Davison and the discrete nature and stability of species
Don’t feel that your life’s work has been worthless or useless. If the big-heads of neoDarwinism and Evolutionism ignore you, that’s nothing compared with the thousands of silent students that are attentive to your publications and comments.
This Intelligent Design revolution is necessary for the freedom and progress in science. You yourself have declared that you are proud to take part on this revolution. You can see that Mark Ryland, from the Discovery Institute (Intelligent Design's Think Tank in the U.S.A.), on May 7, 2005 in the Washington Journal (CSPAN) (Windows Media, big file, 61.8MB) specifically mentioned your name and your bad experience with a currently totalitarian scientific establishment, unfortunately still controlled by a Darwinian Evolutionism to date.
For example, in Australia “More than 100 schools are already teaching intelligent design as science, alongside the mandatory curriculum requirement to study evolution.” And 3,000 more have been showing to their students the great documentary that is “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” (RealPlayer), opening the minds and eyes of a full generation completely new, unbiased by the pernicious Evolutionary Darwinian thinking.
And Finally yes, a Common and Intelligent Design is reflected in nature. The evidence is for common ancestry within genetically compatible organisms, like a common ancestor, respectively in Canis, or in Finches, or in Cichlids, etc…
The evidence is not for a common descent of all living forms from an imprecise semi-molecule or an uncertain semi-cell in an ancient and chaotic soup, which is the careless view held by Darwinism and by Evolution in general.
fdocc
Well thanks for posting but please don't ever think that I feel my life's work has been wasted. i am having the time of my life exposing the Darwinian myth as just that. The only thing that I don't like is the failure of our adversaries to respond. I would
love to take on Dawkins. I regard him as an intellectual disaster and certainly not a scientist by any means. He keeps on saying he wants to sell his product which as near as I can tell is snake oil. I can't even get a rise out of lightweights like P.Z. Meyers or Wesley Elsberry. Instead of defending their idiotic hypothesis they ban me from their shabby little groupthinks. That is intellectual cowardice pure and simple and I love it so!
Also I don't want any pity for my experience at the University of Vermont. I enjoyed that demonstration of bigotry as well. The best way to deal with matters like this is to give your adversary every opportunity to make a damn fool of himself. It never fails. That is why I continue to invite everyone to come out and post right here where I can respond to them. If they refuse to cooperate, it means only one thing, in a word, fear, fear of the truth, that they have dedicated their lives to a myth, that there is not a shred of substance in the Darwinian model, that it is in fact a hoax, perpetrated and then perpetuated by generation after generation of genetically predisposed liberal mentalities that are incapable of accepting an ordered purposeful universe.
There now, I feel somewhat better.
Thanks for giving me an opportunity to freely fulminate.
"When all think alike, no one thinks very much."
Walter Lippmann
"Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don't ever apologize for anything."
Harry S. Truman
Also would someone, who has not been banned from Panda's Thumb, please transmit my invitation to their groupthink membership to comment here where I am free to react.
Thanks for posting.
Let me call attention to two other venues that are least sympathetic to this one. I post at both and refer all to check them from time to time to avoid having to repeat myself here.
Teleological Blog at:
teleological.org/WPblog/
and:
Research on Intelligent Design at:
fdocc.blogspot.com/
Ye Gods another booboo. That should read that are AT least sympathetic to this one. I must be getting old!
Hey davescot, My fingers are starting to hurt too.
Has anyone yet invited the troops over at Panda's thumb to post here? I would do it myself but I'm banned. The place to issue the invitation is at the "Bathroom Wall" which has been inactive for months. That was the only place they would ever let my posts appear and, since I was banned, there is nothing being posted there anymore as they now present a perfect united front and there is no longer any dissent at good old "Panda's Dislocated Pollex" also known as "Elsberry's last stand." I can still read their schlock so I will look for the invite. Don't let me down. I am sure davescot could find a way. This could be fun.
Come out, come out, wherever you are!
War, God help me, I love it so!
General George S. Patton, a fellow predestinationist.
That goes for you too, Richard Dawkins!
Excellent Phil, excellent!
Now I don't want to have to resort to calling Darwinians mindless cowards or anything like that because that is not civilized behavior. But if they don't respond to my gracious invitations to defend their position in the open forum which this blog presents, I may have to do just that.
Here is what I suggest. Anyone with convictions on the subject of evolution is invited to present a summary in a short essay. I would think ones core beliefs could be contained in 500 words or so. Now if one has no core beliefs, that too could be offered for general consideration. I don't believe this has been tried yet on the internet and I think it could prove to be very illuminating. That way each participant would be defending his particular version of the great mystery of evolution rather than simply ridiculing the position of a real or imagined adversary which seems to be the prevailing situation on most forums.
Since I have already presented my position here and eslewhere, let me repeat those three little words that have gotten me into so much trouble in the past.
Who is next?
The silence which my generous offer evokes speaks volumes as to the confidence of those who think they know all about an event which no one has ever witnessed, namely the appearance of a new "kind" of living creature. That silence alone serves to prove my point. The forces that have made both ontogeny and phylogeny possible remain cloaked in mystery.
Naturally, I am pleased with the obvious lack of conviction by those who, given every opportunity imaginable to hold forth, are quite unable or unwilling to present their case for public discussion.
Dawkins is begging for the opportunity to "sell his product." Well, Sir Richard, here is your golden opportunity to present your bottled elixir for all to sip, enjoy and evaluate.
I'll leave a light on for you.
I just visited the "Bathroom Wall" at Panda's Thumb to discover that no one has as yet extended my invitation for them to post at my blog. I can hardly expect them to respond if they do not know I exist. Would someone do what I would do if I could and alert the denizens of PT that this blog exists?
If you refuse, please explain why. Surely that is not asking too much is it? Similarly I urge all to request that Sir Richard Dawkins come to this open forum to present his "product" for our consumption and appraisal. So far he has ignored my invitation as he has always done in the past. You see, I don't exist and neither do my sources. There just might be strength in numbers as the saying goes, but we will never know unless we try.
In the immortal words of Shakespeare:
"God for Harry, England and St. George."
In case you are wondering, that's St George Jackson Mivart, one of the first and most devastating critics of the Darwinian fairy tale.
How do you like them apples?
Let's get this show on the road.
I'm bored.
If you would like to join me in invitating Dawkins, his email address is richard.dawkins@new.ox.ac.uk
That is his Oxford email. I understand he rarely goes there and doesn't even lecture any more. He stays in his little three story cottage wondering what to do next I guess.
I sure wouldn't want to be in his shoes right now.
In the immortal words of Jackie Gleason:
"Oooh, how sweet it is!
I see that there is no evidence that my requests have been met to inform the denizens of Panda's Thumb and Uncommon Descent of the existence of my blog and my invitation for all to present their positions here in open discussion.
It seems I am some kind of pariah that no one wants anything to do with for fear of being identified with my perspective which is neither Darwinian mysticism nor religious fundamentalism but instead, a whole new way of examining the greatest mystery in all of biology.
I did not open this blog to pontificate on my convictions. I have already presented them in publication so they are now for eternity. This blog is to expose Darwinism as the biggest and most long lived hoax in the history of science. My challenges here and elsewhere have gone unanswered and unrecognized just as have those of my sources. Both major factions in this insane debate are dead wrong. It is a beautiful demonstration of a prescribed evolution which even includes the way all of us have been victimized by our genetic constitution.
In any event, since I am apparently wasting my time, I will take a little time off until someone screws up enough courage either to respond to some of my heresies or to comply with my simple request to inform others who have banned me of the existence of this blog.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
I have to conclude with Rodney Dangerfield:
"I get no respect."
Neither did Mendel for 32 years. 1984 + 32 = 2016 at which time I would have been 88 had I lived, which is exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless, like Mendel I am confident that:
"Meine Zeit wird schon kommen!"
Whatever happened to davescot and Paul Yost and frank passman, the only critics of my heresies so far. They were fun while they lasted which wasn't very long. Don't they know that quitters never win and winners never quit?
Excuse me for sounding off again, but while looking for some evidence that someone has called Dembski's attention to my blog (I see no sign of that), I notice that many commentators at "Uncommon Descent" seem to deny evolution entirely by equating evolution with the Darwinian version. That would seem reasonable in light of the title of that forum. If man does not enjoy a common descent with at least other primates, perhaps someone would tell me just who were his ancestors or didn't he have any? This seems to be a question no one at that forum seems willing to answer.
Let me answer it for them. There is now absolutely no question that Homo sapiens,
the chimpanzee, the gorilla and the orang are all closely related and the evidence pleads strongly that all primates shared a common ancestor or possibly ancestors There is no reason whatsoever to insist on monophyletic evolution and several reasons not to.
After all, if evolution has been "prescribed" as I have postulated, new, seemingly related forms could appear at any time from any source. Berg presented several examples of what convincingly appear to involve polyphyletic evolution. I learned long ago not to underestimate this great scientist.
I really feel that under the circumstances, Dembski should change the name of his forum but I am willing to bet that he won't. The very least he should do is to identify his own ancestors. I am betting he won't attempt that either. It doesn't matter anyway as I just did it for him.
So far I seem unable to get a rise out of the Darwinian mystics. God knows I've been trying. Maybe the following will do the trick.
As you know, the basis for the PEH is that the information for all of evolution was somehow preprogrammed and unfolded during time as it was expressed in the flora and fauna of the past and present, a process which I do not believe is any more in progress. Leo Berg presented many examples of the premature appearance of advanced features in primitive organisms, a phenomenon he called "phylogenetic acceleration." One dramatic example is the presence of a true placenta in certain but not all sharks.
I have extended this concept and choose to call the same phenomenon "phylogenetic derepression," thereby emphasizing that the information was already present in latent form.
One of the most bizarre demonstrations of this phenomenon is presented by the monotreme mammal, the celebrated "duck-billed platypus." It has mammalian mammary glands and hair, a reptilian/avian reproductive system with a cleidoic (shelled) egg and of course, as the name implies, a duck-like bill. But the problem is that the bill is not really like that of a duck as I am sure some zoologist would soon remind me if I were to claim that it was. No indeed. Despite many opinions to the contrary, I'm no fool so I won't make that mistake. Instead the bill is very much like and serves the same function as the bill of a fish!
The fish in question is Polyodon spathula, one of only two surviving species of a very ancient family called the Polyodontidae. One species is in China, the other, P. spathula, here in America in the Mississippi valley. The American species is known as the Paddlefish, Spoonbill Cat, Duck-Bill Cat, Spadefish, Shovelfish and Shovelnose Sturgeon. They are huge animals, weighing upwards of 150 pounds and, like many others, are in danger of extinction.
The bill functions rather exactly as does the bill of the platypus, serving to stir up the bottom and find and consume the minute animal food on which it subsists, worms, leeches, aquatic insects and small crustaceans.
So now we can regard the platypus as a bizarre kind of a chimaeric combination of features found separately in three or four vertebrate groups, the mammals, the birds, the reptiles and the fishes! A beautiful demonstration in support of the PEH if I do say so myself.
As I used to say before it so enraged my adversaries that they found it necessary to ban me for life -
How do you like them apples?
Of course I substituted all kinds of fruit and vegetables during the course of my tenure at Panda's Thumb. Finally they just couldn't handle it any more and Wesley Elsberry had to implement the "final solution to the Davison problem." Following my eviction for life, the "Bathroom Wall," the only place I had been allowed to post, has not been active since August 18th, 2005 that is. It sure was fun while it lasted. Panda's Thumb now presents a united front. I call it - "Elsberry's last stand," a gallant but futile attempt to preserve the Darwinian fairy tale. Panda's Thumb is now what it has always been, the "Alamo" of Darwinian mysticism. I love it so!
How do you like them Concord grapes, Wesley?
Don't just sit there, say something.
So you see, my friends, assuming I still have some, both sides in this mindless debate are full of it right up to their chins. The Darwinians are still worshippimg the Great God Chance and the Fundamentalists literally don't know where they came from and don't seem to care either. It boggles my ancient mind that such a condition could persist this long.
As usual the Roman Church is the voice of sanity by accepting organic evolution as an established fact but questioning, even discarding, the validity of the Darwinian explanation.
The great strength of the PEH lies in its capacity to include a designer or designers at the same time that it has no place for chance. Furthermore, it does not require a living God or any form of divine intervention. It was all established in the remote past one or more times in a way analagous to the way the individual develops from a single cell, the fertilized egg. Both have been goal-seeking and, as nearly as I can determine, the phylogenetic goal was reached a long time ago with the final arrival of Homo sapiens. From now on it seems to me to be all downhill.
As that great old ballad from 1932 claims - "Don't Blame Me." A decade before that Leo Berg in 1922, six years before I was born, put his Russian finger on the problem of both ontogeny and phylogeny:
In the chapter entitled "Evolution Follows a Definte Direction or is Determined by Law:"
"We may summarize the present section in the following words: the laws of the organic world are the same, WHETHER WE ARE DEALING WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL (ontogeny) OR THAT OF A PALAEONTOLOGICAL SERIES (phylogeny). Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance."
Nomogenesis, page 134 (his emphasis)
Leo Berg recognized 83 years ago that which has still not penetrated the barrier of the Darwinian cranium. Until it does, the idiotic and totally unnecessary debate will undoubtedly continue. I am glad to be out of that loop. It is the only place to be.
In athletics they have tournaments in which participants are seeded. Some tournaments are by invitation. This blog is one of those. It is an open tournament in which everyone, everywhere, with whatever perspective has been invited to participate. So far only two have surfaced to very briefly present their views, davescot and Paul Yost. Neither has been heard from since. That hardly qualifies as a contest.
I am currently being harangued with emails from Dietrich Claus, aka SwiftWindHorse, the proprietor of Fringe Sciences, one of the most virulent, anti-intellectual, anti- American forums in all of cyberspace. Too cowardly to speak openly, he resorts to the revealing tactics which have always served to identify the bigoted ideologue, sniping from behind a wall of secrecy, confident he will not be exposed. Well he just was.
When an opponent fails to show up at a tennis match he loses that match. It is called a forfeit.
Let me be clear. I am like a dog with a bone and I have no intention of giving that bone up without a fight. I no one wants to play, I win and they lose by forfeiture. Actually that is exactly how all my sources won in the past. They won because the Darwinians and the Fundamentalists alike failed to show up and confront them. Nothing has changed. Bateson, Berg, Broom, Schindewolf, Goldschmidt, Grasse and many others including myself were the real winners in the evolutionary game and all for exactly the same reason. Their opponents never showed up, never recognized their existence and, in cowardly fashion, unable to respond with reason, have continued to imagine that their adversaries have never existed.
Well folks that won't wash any more. One of my stated objectives has always been to resurrect some of the finest minds of two centuries from the trash heap the Darwinians have frantically tried to entomb them. Led on by homozygous atheists like Gould, Provine, Mayr and Dawkins, not a scientist in the lot, Darwinism, still the ruling paradigm, has proven to be the greatest source of intellectual embarrassment in the history of the Western World. I am pleased as punch with the way it is all shaking out.
"No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men."
Thomas Carlyle
If you are bored with this blog, I have been taking on edarrell over at "The Teleological Blog." I also invited him to show up here. I'm betting he won't.
Dembski over at Uncommon Descent is getting more and more arrogant about what he will or will not tolerate in the way of comments. His blog, it is hardly a forum, has become little more than on organ for sycophants to bolster his already inflated ego. It is sad. All in all, it is probably a good thing he banned me long ago.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Dietwald Claus, aka SwiftWindHorse, continues to harass me via email and so I continue to expose him here where he is too cowardly to express his venom.
On a more pleasant note, has anyone as yet joined me in inviting Dawkins to present and defend his "product" here at this blog expressly designed for that purpose? Also has anyone as yet informed those forums that have already banned me that I welcome their contributions here as well?
Come one, come all.
I am beginning to feel like King Richard III in Act V.
"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse."
I thought I had a horse in the person of davescot but apparently he "threw me." I'm not even sure about Phil Engle any more.
In any event I want to thank ALL my loyal supporters wherever they might be. Without them I could never have withstood the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" which have characterized my "hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."
Isn't Shakespeare wonderful?
I still maintain I have been banned from more forums than anyone else in internet history with the possible exception of Scott L. Page, the man with a thousand aliases. I would love to hear from him if he is still alive that is and not afraid to expose himself once more time.
I understand Page was banned 5 times from ARN alone. No mean achievement.
Dietwald Claus, aka SwiftWindHorse, the proprietor of Fringe Sciences, continues to harass me by sending me nasty emails. I have repeatedly asked him to stop but he insists on continuing. Here is his latest effort verbatim in its entirety.
(You combine two of the most vile characteristics a human being can have: you are a hypocrite and you are malicious.
What a sad life you have.
but, as I have said before: at least you can serve humanity by being a model of how not to be.
also some achievement.
gg)
I have no idea what gg stands for.
Now if anyone else would prefer to post here via my email please feel free. I will be happy to transfer your sentiments to this blog in their entirety as I just did for SwiftWindHorse.
His email address is: swiftwindhorse@hotmail.de
Come one, come all and the devil take the hindmost.
Let me modify with a single word a comment by Shakespeare"
"Thus conscience does make cowards of YOU all."
Maybe that will evoke a response but I wouldn't bet on it. I think I'll have a drink.
As long as nothing else is going on, I'll take this opportunity to bring you up to date with Dietwald Claus who continues to send me venomously emails. Here is an excerpt from his latest email after I warned him for the third time not to send me any more. Apparently he is a slow learner or maybe a masochist.
{ but, as I have stated repeatedly publicly: you are stupid. stupid. stupid. or, maybe, the most elaborate troll in internet history. If you were a troll, you would be brilliant. since you are not a troll, you are just plain STUPID }
Please note the lack of proper punctuation.
This is typical of the the sort of reaction I am so competent at evoking from cowardly trash like Dietwald Claus aka SwiftWindHorse, the proprietor and founder of that great liberal institution known as Fringe Sciences, the most virulent, subversive, anti-intellectual and anti-American organ on the internet. Incidentally, Paul Yost and Frank Passman serve their master there as assistant managers. It is a great groupthink and mutual admiration society which is why very little ever happens there, nothing in over a week.
I'm so proud.
As I used to say over at EvC before Percy banned me for life - Who is next? Don't be shy. Come one, come all.
I'll leave a light on for you.
Prescribed Evolution has been in existence a little more than a month. Let me take stock.
I have made two simple requests, neither of which have been honored as far as I know.
I have asked that someone please inform the various forums from which I have been banned of the existence of this blog and of my invitation for anyone to present his evolutionary views here for open discussion.
I have also asked that others join with me by inviting Sir Richard Dawkins, as I already have, to, in his words, "sell his product" here on this or any other internet venue which has questioned the Darwinian myth, provided of course that it is not one where I cannot participate.
Correct me if I am wrong, but it it seems only natural that I now ask WHY has no one complied with these two every simple requests.
Could it be because the Queen has knighted this man? Could it be that we all must live in mortal fear of "Darwin's Rottweiler," this great wordsmith and intellectual giant, this avowed atheist, this mystic who believes devoutly in forces that have never been demonstrated? What ARE the reasons no one will honor such simple requests?
If I should get no answers to my question WHY, I will be forced to draw my own conclusions which I will be certain to present for all to consider. Trust me.
Dietwald Claus continues to harass me. I have no intention of further exposing him as the trash that he is at least not here on this blog. If anyone is interested, I will be happy to forward the whole sordid business. Of course that would mean disclosing your email address and with it a small fraction of your precious anonymity. If that is expecting too much, don't bother. I will understand, of that you can be certain.
I see that "Uncommon Descent" (the very words stick in my throat) has also metamorphosed into what seems to be a mutual admiration society in which nearly everything Dembski presents is met with wild enthusiasm. Panda's Thumb is another example. What is the function of such venues if it is not only to further inflate the egos of the sponsors?
Let me make it very clear that is not the purpose of this blog. I want everyone within cybershot to "take their best shot" and be prepared for my responses. In a word- sockittome! If they don't, it can mean only one thing. That is that they are "living miracles with neither brains nor guts," a description I just stole from Harry S. Truman. I believe it was his characterization of Harold Ickes but I can't be absolutely certain so don't hold me to it. I am getting old and even my long term memory isn't what it used to be. The short term went long ago, which is why I keep repeating myself.
How do you like them overripe tomatoes?
I'll leave a light on for you.
Now I happen to know that davescot posts frequently at "Uncommon Descent" I also know that he has posted here and is aware of my requests. If he does not honor my request at "Uncommon Descent" I will sure know who is responsible won't I? Surely there are also those who are fans of Panda's Thumb, Pharyngula, EvC and most certainly Richard Dawkins, who should be delighted to have their heroes dismantle the subject of this forum and its only visible champion at least here on this forum. What is the matter, aren't the odds good enough for you? But where are you? Have you decided that you too must not exist? That is exactly what the Darwinians did with Berg, Broom, Mivart, Grasse, Schindewolf, Osborn, Goldschmidt and God only knows how many others, including the father of Modern Genetics himself, William Bateson.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
I'll leave a light on for you.
Dietwald Claus continues. He has threatened to present the whole exchancge on Fringe Sciences but of course has not done so. Ideologues are like that don't you know. I won't clutter up my blog with it but will forward the whole sordid demonstration to anyone who isn't afraid to disclose his email address. So far no one is willing even to do that which no longer surprises me. It is part of the non-existence which I continue to enjoy as a result of having rejected both camps in a debate that never should have begun.
"Ooooh, how sweet it is."
Jackie Gleason
How do you like them tangerines?
JAD
"That [species creation/extinction] balance has been seriously disturbed by man."
I'm not buying that without hard evidence of the number of species extinctions vs. creations today and at enough sample periods in the past to establish a baseline and normal deviations therefrom.
Redwood trees are seriously disturbing that balance in the Pacific Northwest. Glaciers seriously disturb the balance. Glaciears and meteor impacts seriously disturb the balance. The point is the balance getting disturbed is par for the course and the ecosystem always bounces back. In fact it is built around disturbance. If there were no disturbances there might be only a few optimal species that have wiped out the competition in their unchanging niches.
"Like Gould, Mayr and Provine before him, Dawkins is not a scientist. He never did an experiment in his life and neither did the others. We have been dominated all too long by clever wordsmiths, firmly ensconsed in their endowed chairs at Oxford, Harvard, Cornell and elsewhere, cranking out literally meter after meter of library shelf science fiction to a gullible, naive, vulnerable, ill educated, uncritical audience many of whom are freely continuing that tradition right here on the web."
Good paragraph. The gullible crowd however seems to be in the halls of academia and secular Europe. The rest of the world either doesn't know those names from Adam and/or they reject the materialist dogma. In the United States fully 80% believe that evolution was at least guided by a higher power.
Speaking of Dawkins, isn't this just precious?
http://www.arn.org/docs/dawkins.mpg
My last few posts have ben interrupted. I will try once more.
davescot
If you are going to reject the mass extinctions without replacements that we now witness, I cannot help you. I am not in the business of providing evidence for that which is obvious. Furthemore, this ecosystem will NOT bounce back. That is pure uniformitarian wishful thinking and flies in the face of everything we really know.
Let's get real, shall we? Evolution is finished, ended, over with and all that remains is extinction. Those are my convictions and they will remain such until proved to be wrong.
Also statistics never had anything to do with evolution either any more than they have anything to do with ontogeny.
While you are here, when are you or some other good soul going to remind the folks at "Uncommon Descent" that this blog exists and welcomes them singly or in groups to present their versions of the great mystery of organic evolution?
Mine is the only blog in cyberspace that has made such an offer. If no one avails themselves of that golden opportunity it means only one thing. I win and they lose because they never showed up, just as they never showed up to confront the six to whom I have dedicated my own work, six of the greatest minds of two centuries. It is called a forfeit.
And don't forget to invite Sir Richard Dawkins, aka "Darwin's Rottweiler." As far as I can tell I am the only one that has. I have the real hots for him.
Thanks for posting. I thought you might be dead.
Anonymous
Thank you for posting. I love that word gullible. So did Montaigne.
"We seek and offer ourselves to be gulled."
Some do but, trust me, I am not one of them.
As for mass extinction, plug in "extinction" on Google and take the first entry.
Every Rottweiler I have ever known was a big baby and so is Dawkins or he would show up.
How do you like them pink grapefruits?
JAD
If you would put a link to your evolutionary manifesto on the front page of this blog I'll post a description to said front page in the comments section of uncommon descent. I'd rather not abuse my commenting privileges there by simply plugging your blog. I have probably posted a link to the manifesto there at least half a dozen times in past six months but the uvm.edu link won't lead here. I can find a topical way to refer to the manifesto quite often so if you'll put a link to it on your blog's front page I'll refer to your blog's front page instead of uvm. That way people interested in the manifesto will also discover your blog.
I'm not buying the mass extinctions on your hand-waving say so. You sound like a frustrated Green Peace tree hugging whacko insisting that man is destroying the planet. Ann Coulter would tear you to shreds for that, by the way. I'll merely leave it as an issue where I asked for evidence of mass extinctions numbering 2 million in the past century and you gave me 3 examples, none of which are even really reliable as the species in question might not have all individuals dead or might have only been varieties of species still in existence.
So there.
The previous comment by "anonymous" was me. I'm not sure how that happened as I thought I was logged in and the blog doesn't even allow anonymous comments!
That is exactly what the Darwinians did with Berg, Broom, Mivart, Grasse, Schindewolf, Osborn, Goldschmidt and God only knows how many others, including the father of Modern Genetics himself, William Bateson.
How about a bibliography of curmudgeons?
Seriously, what are the best books to read on the topic in your opinion?
Thanks to the University of Vermont, my Manifesto is dated. They froze my home page in 2000. besides I have gone a lot further since then. What I want is some action from those who do not buy my Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis which is the purpose of this forum. I ask them all to present their views. I have already presented mine in hard copy and I see no reason to recant.
I do not regard myself as a hand-waving tree hugger and am sorry you have to resort to that sort of tactic. What do you expect that to accomplish?
You have made it pretty clear that you do not agree with my interpretation of the great mystery of organic evolution. You have yet to present your own.
Now, as I used to say over at EvC -
Who is next?
William A. Dembski:
Check out Davison’s new anti-Darwinian blog: http://prescribedevolution.blogspot.com.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/550
analyysi
Thank you very much! I am very much interested in Dembski's view about where we came from and how. I hope he will present it here. That is what this blog is for.
I see Dembski has recognized my blog. It is too bad I can't thank him but I have been banned.
This is a very interesting conversation, but it is a very unconventional way to run a blog. The blogger should place separate topics in new posts to the blog. There are a number of advantages to this, not the least of which is the availability of rss feeds on blogger posts, but not comments.
jeff
I agree this a very unconventional way to run a blog. I am like a dog with a bone. I have proposed a new hypothesis for organic evolution and I am prepared to defend it. I have offered each party an opportunity to offer his version of the evolution scenario so we can compare it with my own. So far very little has transpired. I have also invited Sir Richard Dawkins to do the same and asked others to join me in that invitation. I suggested in an earlier message that a brief essay of 500 words or so should be sufficient to present ones position. The emphasis should be on the MECHANISM of evolution as I regard the fact of a past evolution as established with certainty.
I regard this as an experiment as I know of no other venue with this perspective. As I peruse the internet I see mostly pitched battles between opposed factions rather than rational discussion. I think this might prove to be a fruitful approach. My own position is that of one who has rejected both Darwinian materialism and Christian fundamentalism in favor of the Prescrbed Evolutionary Hypothesis (PEH) which denies any role for chance and requires no intervenetion from God or Gods.
Feel free to join and thanks for posting.
Well, I'm sorry John, but I don't have time to read all this. I've read enough, however, to realize that I would love to butt heads with you. Perhaps I will work on all those comments, but believe me it would be a lot easier if you posted the comments as seperate posts in your actual blog. That being said, my real name is Benjamin David Kissling, and I'm graduating in a few weeks with a BS (hmmmm...) in biochemistry from the University of Nebraska Lincoln.
I've realized that I couldn't agree more with you about evolution, so that's no fun. Instead, let's talk about predestination and free will, because there is something that I find myself at loggerheads with you.
Here's my opening statement:
FREE WILL RULES!!!!!!
Bring it on. (Please, post about this topic in your blog and we can take it from there.)
Pardon the typos in my last post. I accidentally poked the publish button prematurely.
Ben
Thank you. I don't want to talk about free will here but what I will do is let someone else speak for me on this subject because, also a convinced determinist, I happen to agree with him.
"Everything is determined... by forces over which we have no control.
Albert Einstein
"Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their THINKING, FEELING, AND ACTING ARE NOT FREE but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
ibid (my emphasis)
So you see Einstein anticipated the PEH long ago.
The question of a free will is not within the province of science anyway. It is a philosophical matter. Einstein rejected philosophy and so have I. It has no place in science.
"Upon reading books on philosophy, I learned that I stood there like a blind man in front of a painting. I can grasp only the inductive method... the works of speculative philosophy are beyond my reach."
ibid
Amen
Thanks for posting.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
mathew przymura
For the life of me I can't find that email address for Dembski. Could you get it for me?
Thanks
Well now. I see you have an influx of IDers to keep you occupied. I'd bet one or more of them could help you figure out some housekeeping chores like multiple topics as one suggested. I agree with that suggestion but don't ask me how as I'm well on my way to being a confirmed, confounded, certified Luddite.
As you're well aware I have no choice in the matter as there no such thing as free will. Even as I type this I realize I was born to type this. It was written in the stars.
HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You and Einstein sure do have a big blind spot with that determinism crap. God needed some company and He didn't want robots so He gave us free will. Write that down.
Davescot
Well I see you have resurfaced with your usual lack of tact, your hallmark. As a matter of fact your knee jerk responses are the best evidence imaginable that even you are a victim, as we all are, of a Prescribed Evolution, exactly as Einstein anticipated so long ago. You are one hostile cat and I welcome you here as a perfect example of what has happened in the evolutionary debate, a debate that never should have occurred.
If you have now thoroughly vented your spleen, I ask you also to present your view in 500 words or less of the MECHANISM of the great mystery of organic evolution. That is what this blog is all about and if you don't cooperate you also lose by default just as did all those Darwinian mystics when they refused to confront their many critics over the past one hundred and forty odd years. You may write that down and memorize it.
If you want to vent some more first be my guest.
How do you like them omelets?
Thanks for posting.
"War, God help me, I love it so!"
George S. Patton, a fellow determinist.
noah cronym
In my opinion real evolution has never been gradual but always instantaneous. The physiological definition of a real evolutionary event is given by the experimental observation that two forms are isolated from one another such that even if they should hybridize, artificially or naturally, the hybrid would prove to be sterile. That is the definition provided by Dobzhansky and I regard it as a valid criterion for evolutionary separation. Such forms are true species and I know of no experimental demonstration that this condition can be realized through selection. I am a convinced saltationist with Schindewolf, Berg and Goldschmidt.
I believe that all the higher major categories were also produced instantaneously without intermediate states. Of course not very many would agree but that is fine too.
I hope this helps.
Thanks for posting.
John A. Davison:
"For the life of me I can't find that email address for Dembski."
http://www.iscid.org/contact.php
Or:
"email: nospam@sbts.edu (substitute “wdembski” for “nospam”)"
http://www.designinference.com/documents/PDF_Current_CV_Dembski.pdf
Calling me tactless and hostile... is that your twisted way of thanking me for asking Bill Dembski to post a link to your website from his?
Physician, heal thyself.
noah cronym
The answer is yes. Every evolutionary event, like every other genetic event, WAS instantaneous without an intermediate state. That is why intermediates do not exist in the fossil record except in the very broad sense. Smooth transformations cannot be documented and, in my opinion, never will be. Let me paraphrase Otto Schindewolf with whom I agree.
"We might as well stop looking for the missing links as they never existed."
Also let me thank analyysi for providing Dembski's email address.
davescot
Your last post is typical vintage davescot in nature, unnecessarily confrontational, and as for letting Dembski know about my blog, how am I supposed to know who was responsible? It sure took long enough. Cool it. Now if you want to play write your essay or don't. That is up to you.
If contestants don't choose to present their essays on the blog they may send them to me directly as attachments. I will then be happy to collate and categorize them and present them in some sort of order.
Thanks for posting.
The mechanism or mechanisms of past evolution is a mystery as far as I'm concerned and there may not be enough evidence left around to demystify it. Before jumping to any conclusions we should at least understand the function of each bit of coded information contained in the DNA of a simple bacteria.
You seem quite willing to jump to conclusions. Your heated supposition that mankind has caused the extinction of 2 million species in the past century while only able to give me 3 examples of ostensibly extinct species, is evidence of the leaps of faith you're willing to take over huge gaps in the data.
Hybrid sterility isn't an absolute but is rather of matter of reduced fecundity. How close the reduction approaches zero is arbitrary. Maybe it never actually reaches zero. All life shares a common genetic code and all are able to exchange heritable genetic information through viral vectors. Who would have thunk that bacteria and baboons can exchange genetic information? Yet it's rather firmly established now they can and do. What's that do to archaic definitions of species? Life even at the simplest level of the smallest bacteria is far more complicated than anyone imagined.
The only thing I believe can be said with reasonable assuredness at this point is that there are no theories of evolution. There are failed hypotheses and there are untested hypotheses.
The text in bold was told to me by John A. Davison, an occasionally brilliant biologist.
Is that close enough to 500 words?
You calling me hostile is a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. Does ad hominem figure big into your science or is that just a hobby of yours?
Now that you know, I still didn't hear a "thank you" in there anywhere. That's the traditional response in polite society when someone goes out of their way for you. As soon as I see some evidence of civility in you I'll "cool it". Otherwise, when in Rome...
johnadavison says:
"Anyone with convictions on the subject of evolution is invited to present a summary in a short essay."
Well, regardless of what your opinion is, from the little I know of you, I have confidence that you will not censor me - as William Dembski has done.
This is not my opinion. This is fact -
The designer is the designed.
Unfortunately for the atheists, this rubs their extreme the wrong way. As for the mono/polytheists, this too, rubs them the wrong way. The "designer" is not "out there". But to deny intelligence altogether is absurd. The designer is the designed - just as the observer is the observed.
But don't listen to me. I'm not trying to write well-known books and get my name known (pity those who succeed at such efforts). I have no "view" to propagate. I have no fancy degrees in theology or science. So how could I possibly have any clue as to what I'm talking about? I do not read evolutionary books or holy accounts. As DaveScot implied on Dembski's blog, I'm probably just an AIDS-inflicted African suffering from dementia. A simple fool.
But for what its worth, this is obvious - The designer is the designed.
Most will not accept this though. This leaves no room for conflict. The atheist/theist debate has been profitable for many so why would anyone want to end it? If we see clearly that the designer is the designed, then there is no more discussion - no more books to write debating the existence or non-existence of THAT "out there". After all, this is not theory. It is neither theology nor science. But as we know, most participating in these debates are after a stimulating conflict - a chance to "be right" - to flex their brains and claim intellectual superiority over their fellow beings. We need to intellectualize god - for if we didn't we would have no belief - no image or idea to worship. We would have to face our fear directly. Most are not interested in doing so - we'd rather play with our fear - dance around it - chat about it and find various ways to escape it - whether it be through belief in god "out there" or a good stiff drink. Most are not after truth. Most are satiated with their belief.
I'm sure Einstein was intelligent enough to understand philosophy if he had given his time to it, and would have been beneficial considering the fields of philosophy and science are inexorably intertwined. Philosophy is much less difficult than science, but that could just be the neurons in my brain telling me what to say by following prescribed patterns of motion. But in any case, I think the issue of free will has everything to do with ID.
What is intelligence? I submit that intelligence as far as ID is concerned is nothing more or less than free will. ID is trying to identify the mark of intelligence on the physical. What is the mark of intelligence? Or more appropriately for ID theory, how do you firmly and conclusively detect intelligence and rule out natural mechanisms? First, you have to know the natural mechanisms, and I agree with davescot, we don't know them very well yet, and maybe never will. But lack of knowledge never stopped scientists like Einstein from philosophizing about determinancy. And lack of knowledge should not stop progressive scientists such as yourself from trying out new theories to see if they can have any impact on science. Hence, ID. ID takes the natural mechanisms we know and posits that they are not sufficient to produce life as we know it. As a self-organizationalist (correct me if I'm wrong about you), I would think that you give a high importance to natural mechanisms in the production of life, but apparently you believe that all those mechanisms were designed in the first place. My question becomes, if you believe that natural mechanisms were all designed, then how do you know the difference between what is designed and what is not?
noah cronym
Thank you for asking the 64 dollar question. I have addressed this problem in my Manifesto in great detail but I will summarize it this way. It has been experimentally determined in amphibians that a single female can without the intervention of a mate produce both sexes and those products are fertile. Thus there is no question that in those forms all of the necessary information is present in the female genome alone to produce both sexes. This is obviouly also true for a wide variety of organisms from several phyla. While this has not been demonstrated in mammals, that does not mean it is not true there as well. Experimentally induced, semi-meiotic parthenogenesis has not even been attempted in mammals and until it is my semi-meiotic hypothesis remains viable. I refer you to my unpublished "An Evolutionary manifesto: A New Hypothesis for Organic Change." It is available at the ISCID "brainstorms" forum, my old UVM home page and elsewhere.
Thank you for posting and I hope this helps.
ben
I regard a past Intelligence or Intelligences as a mandatory starting point without which nothing in either ontogeny or phylogeny will ever make sense. Referring to those two clearly related phenomena, Leo Berg put it this way way back in 1922.
"Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance."
Nomogenesis, page 134
Let there be no question about it. I regard Leo Berg as the single most significant evolutionist of all time. That is precisely why he has not been allowed to exist in the evolutionary literature. He was neither a Darwinian nor a religious zealot and has been shunned by both ideologies but not by me. I predict that some day the term "Darwinian evolution" will be replaced by "Bergian evolution." One of my declared goals is to see that happen, that is if I live long enough which is problematical.
Thank you for posting.
gnuosphere
What can I say but Bravo!
Thank you very much for a thoughtful message.
davescot
Was I not civil? Were you not uncivil? I will let others draw their own conclusions. Assuming, as I must, that you are the one that talked Dembski into recognizing the existence of this blog, what would you have me do now? You want a medal? Well I just awarded you one. Others posting here have done it without rancor and innuendo. I am sure you can manage to do so as well. Just try.
I hope that someone else can convince davescot that we are facing a crisis of extinction. Obviously he rejects my attempts and I have more important things to consder.
Thanks for posting.
I have extended invitations to William Dembski and Richard Dawkins for each, in Dawkins' own words, to "Sell his product." I also forwarded the invitation to each to the other. I cannot imagine a more interesting exchange; can anyone? What an opportunity for these two widely acknowledged leaders to expound.
But will they? I doubt they will even acknowledge receipt of my invitations or if they do it will probably include several reasons why they cannot manage a 500 word summary of their views on the mechanism which was responsible for the great mystery of organic evolution, a process which has never been directly observed. Mark my words. In any event I will post their responses should that transpire.
If evolution was prescribed then can we falsify your notion by finding that it was or has been proscribed, by any chance? Maybe one has to take a chance, to have a chance.
By the way, click on the Blogger button to the right of your blog then click "new post" to the right of Prescribed Evolution.
This is the funniest pro-IDiocy blog I've yet seen.
It's curious that the term idiot became an insult as it was originally based on a clinical or naturalistic explanation for a lack of intelligence, for instance a physical brain lesion medically diagnosed. Your use of the term indicates that at some level you do not agree that all idiocy has a spiritually neutral scientific explanation. If it does, then how and why do you seek to hold people accountable for idiocy?
Something to keep in mind, if you still can:
"Let language be the divining rod that finds sources of thought." --Karl Kraus
It seems that it is hard for those who have the Darwinian urge to merge to keep a conceptual thought in their mind-of-the-synaptic-gaps.
I challenged both Dawkins and Dembski directly by email and forwarded each challenge to the other. As for j daley, the last 6 posts were from others. Things are looking up I say.
I don't want a medal. A simple "thank you" will suffice. You asked me to do it, I did it, and you have yet to show the common courtesy to say thank you. Instead I get "it took long enough" and "do you want a medal"?
Goodbye.
I deeply resent being accused of "Darwinian speak." I am the most rabid antiDarwinian in cyberspace. I wouldn't give you a nickel for any of it. It is quite unnecessary to identify anything about the Designer or Designers when the reality of their past existence is transparent at least to this investigator. For anyone to claim they can in any way characterize the nature of such primordial forces is absurd. Even more absurd is to assume a personality for such elements. We know NOTHING about those origins except that they did occur.
However I am confident that the MECHANISM by which prescribed information has been released is subject to discovery. It seems to be due to the restructuring of the chromosome. There WAS a whole new kind of genetics involved in these effects which are entirely independent of Mendelian sexually mediated genetics which HAD nothing whatsoever to do with creative evolution. Everything we now know can be reconciled with a model that required (past tense of course) absolutely no input from the environment and no intervention from outside the organism by any supernatural element. While the supernatural may have been necessary in the beginning. Once begun, everything became natural and accordingly subject to discovery. That is exactly what science is now and always has been about. You may write that down.
Thanks for posting.
My last post was in response to Teleologist. I am sorry davescot went off in a huff again. He does that often. I am delighted with the plethora of responses and will comment on them if I can keep up.
Thank you red reader for a thoughtful post. I too am a student of history, especially the history of evolutionary thought, an area deliberately and inexcusably ignored by the Darwinian establishment. It constitutes a scandal unprecedented in the history of science.
The primary reason I have questioned a monophyletic evolution is because of the empirically supported opinion of Leo Berg for whom I have enormous respect. I learned long ago not to underestimate the greatest Russian biologist of his generation and, in my opinion, the greatest evolutionist of all time.
"Organisms have developed from tens of thousands of primary forms, i.e, polyphyletically."
Nomogenesis, page 406.
j daley
I recommend you be more discriminatimg about what you read and some what more restrained in whom you describe as an idiot. I welcome your comment nevertheless as you have served to voluntarily reveal yourself as just one more helpless myrmidon of the homozygous atheist mentality so perfectly represented by Stephen Jay Gould, Ernst Mayr and most recently by that ultra-Darwinian mystic and wordsmith extraordinaire, Sir Richard Dawkins, knighted by the Queen you know. You remind us all of what the stakes really are in this war over the control of man's position in the universe.
"War, God help me, I love it so!"
General George S. Patton, with Einstein and myself a convinced predestinationist.
You are precious. Thanks for posting.
As I used to say at EvC before Percy couldn't take it any more and banned me for life:
Who is next?
and of course,
How do you like them pomegranates?
Teleologist says:
"I was just trying to make a point that we need a complete paradigm change."
The designer is the designed.
Gnuosphere
Thank you for the link to your blog. I agree with what I see there. You may quote me.
"Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove there is no God."
Thomas Henry Huxley
"Science commits suicide when she adopts a creed."
ibid
Incidentally, that last by Huxley is the only frontispiece to Leo Berg's Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law.
On a personal note, I do not believe there is a God because I see no sign of one but there sure had to be one or more in the distant past. I am currently inclined toward at least two, one benevolent, the other malevolent. The latter may still be active.
"The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and science lies in the concept of a personal God."
Albert Einstein
Amen
Thanks for posting.
Teleologist
A mechanism IS necessary. That is what science is all about. As for a paradigm shift, I thought I had offered one with the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis just as Berg had long ago with his "Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law." Apparently Berg and I were both mistaken as were Goldschmidt, Grasse, Osborn, Bateson, Schindwolf and Broom, not one of whom, including myself, found it necessary to invoke a personal God. The simple truth is that none of us have been allowed to exist in an evolutionary literature still dominated by two armed camps blindly dedicated to self destruction. It boggles my ancient mind.
"If you tell the truth, you can be certain, sooner or later, to be found out."
Oscar Wilde
"God designed the stomach to vomit up things that were bad for it but he overlooked the human brain."
Konrad Adenauer
How do you like them candied yams?
Thanks for posting.
Ummm... You do realize that the point of a blog is to produce articles for people to comment on; and not just generate an endless comment thread consisting of your own comments, right? You'd do better to move all those long comments into their own posts -- perhaps then more people would see that it's an active blog and would come check it out.
This is for dd5dd and jc from nc, obvious aliases.
It is I who will decide the purposes of this blog. It is to comment on the mystery of organic evolution and to invite the opinions of others. Neither of you do either. Many others have.
Thus is for j daley assuming he is still with us. He was upset when I called him a myrmidon. I was pleased when he called me an idiot. Any publicity is good publicity.
As for what to read and what not to read
"He that I am reading seems always to have the most force."
Montaigne
"I read as little of Richard Dawkins as possible"
Cyrus Noe
As for reading generally let me quote Louis Agassiz who founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and I am sure has rolled over in his grave several times since at what has happened there. He was a staunch anti-Darwinian unlike many of his successors.
"Study Nature, not books."
When I first visted the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole Massachusetts a half century ago I found that bit of advice plastered on the wall up high on the right as you enter the main brick building. I haven't been back recently but I imagine it is still there. If it isn't it should be.
j daley
The notion that evolution is finished is hardly new with me. If you would peruse the literature you would discover that none other than Julian Huxley, author of "Evolution: The Modern Synthesis" claimed exactly that in 1942, a conclusion he accepted lock stock and barrel from Robert Broom. I documented the whole business in my Manifesto and again in my paper "Julian Huxley's Confession." Grasse implied as much as well.
Don't misunderstand me. I love it when people like you post, especially when you find it necessary to be abusive. It is music to my ears as it is the mark of profound insecurity. If the professionals think I am "nuts" why don't they say so in hard copy? Coming from you it is only laughable. Write a paper about my mental state and see if you can find a publisher. The professionals can't seem to manage it. Whatever you do, don't stop posting here or elsewhere. It is obviously very important to you.
Incidentally, I have never denied the possibility of real speciation. What I have specifically denied is that it cannot take place through the known agency of the natural or artificial selection for Mendelian alleles. If it could it would have been demonstrated under laboratory conditions decades ago. In other words sexual reproduction is incometent as an evolutionary device. Even worse, sexual reproduction is, exactly like natural selection, entirely anti-evolutionary, serving only to stabilize the species long enough for it to become extinct. Without extinction there could never have been evolution. The whole Darwinian scheme is a fantasy with no foundation in reality. It has ABSOLUELY NOTHIMNG to do with creative evolution beyond the formation of varieties and in some cases, but certainly not all, subspecies.
The entire Darwinian scheme was based on the unwarranted asumption that everything has an externally detectable cause. Neither ontogeny nor phylogeny ever had anything to do with the environment beyond its capacity to act as a releaser or derepressor of latent endogenous information. Get used to it. I have, Schindewolf did, Berg did, Broom did and so did Grasse. You probably could too but will you? Probably not if you keep reading only Gould, Provine, Ayala, Dawkins and Mayr who all think basically alike. Try some Schindewolf Goldschmidt, Grasse, Berg and Bateson as an antidote. You might even consider some Davison. His sources were real scientists.
"When all think alike no one thinks very much."
Walter Lippmann
Thanks for posting.
Phil Engle
Thank you. Are you suggestimg that various animal groups have not been reproductively in continuity with one another? It sounds like special creation on the face of it.
I admit that we don't know how many times life was created and I certainly am not wed to a single monophyletic origin by any means any more than Berg was.
Of course new forms "split off" from their predecessors. That is the definition of evolution. Just because we don't see it now does not mean it didn't occur in the past. Maybe I am missing something.
As far as MECHANISM is concerned I mean just that. All actions have a cause. That cause is the MECHANISM that produced the result. I am not a mystic. It is the Darwinians that are the mystics. They keep insisting on causes or "mechanisms" that they cannot verify. Among these are allelic mutations, natural or artificial selection and sexual reproduction, none of which had anything to do with creative evolution and all of which lead inexorably to ultimate extinction. How wrong can one hypothesis be I wonder.
Wolfgang Pauli put it this way.
That theory is useless. It isn't even wrong."
Neo-Darwinism is not even a theory. Theories are verified hypotheses. It remains what it always has been, the most failed hypothesis in the history of science, nothing more than the simultaneous fantasy of a couple of Victorian naturalists, one of whom, Alfred Russel Wallace had the good sense to completely abandon it later in life. The other one instigated a century and a half of what can only be described as mass hysteria.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
Thanks for posting.
j daley
Just for fun and I don't really mean it, let's just assume that true speciation can now proceed through the known agencies of sexual reproduction and the accumulation of allelic mutations which become established through omnipotent Natural Selection. Note that I capitalized it out of respect. Are you or anyone else within cybershot prepared to claim that this same presumed device was responsibile for the formation of genera, families, orders, classes and phyla both plant and animal?
Don't be shy. I expect a yes or no answer.
The PEH can handle all of this without having to resort to any absolutely outrageous and patently impossible assumptions. That is its great strength.
As for Ernst Mayr, Stephen J.Gould down the hall and Richard Dawkins across the pond, all were glued to their endowed chairs virtually all their profesional lives cranking out miles of library shelf space for gullible audiences and at the same time were deliberately, indeed cowardly, ignoring all those real scientists who had exposed their groupthink atheist mentality with undeniable absolute truths. Furthermore, not one of them was a religious mystic and neither am I.
"Directed by all-powerful selection, chance becomes a sort of providence, which, under the cover of atheism is not named but which is secretly worshipped. We believe that there is no reason for being forced to choose between "either randomness or the supernatural," a choice into which the advocates of randomness strive vainly to back their opponents. It is neither randomness nor supernatural power, but laws which govern living beings; to determine these laws is the aim and goal of science which should here have the final say."
"To insist even with Olympian assurance that life appeared quite by chance and evolved in this fashion, is an unfounded supposition which I believe to be wrong and not in accordance with the facts."
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, page 107
"Evolution is in a great measure an unfolding of pre-exsting rudiments."
Leo Berg, Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law, page 406
Thanks for posting.
I have the distinct impression that your posts give YOU an inflated sense of YOUR own importance. I am sure you will be happy to know that I have not stepped into the classroom since the fall of 2000. Please don't run off before answering my simple question with a yes or a no. Or is that asking too much?
Thanks for having posted. I believe you have made yourself understood. I can assure you that others share your sentiments so you have not surprised me.
"Darwinians of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your Natural Selection."
John A. Davison, after Karl Marx.
"I have always felt that a politician* is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents."
Winston Churchill
*substitute Anti-Darwinian, anti- Fundamentalist evolutionist.
Incidentally the Judith Van Houten and Joan Smith whuch j daley described as his/her heroes were, past tense, my Chairperson and Dean respectively. Smith is dead and Van Houten was relieved of her position as Chair of the Biology Department which was, in my estimation, a wise action on the part of the administration. Unfortunately, both took place after my resignation on December 1, 2000. Otherwise I might still be harming minds at the University of Vermont. Horrors!
Also incidental but revealing, there is no record that I ever was a professor (for 333 years) at the University of Vermont. Just as I and my many sources do not exist in the professional evolutionary literature so I do not exist and never existed in the annals of the University of Vermont. Don't take my word for it. Just try to find me there. You see the rank of Professor Emeritus is honorary and I never earned it. I love it so! What more could a critic of mythology want?
It is hard to believe isn't it?
Excuse the typo. It was 33 years. It only seemed like 333 years.
Where are all those "hit and runners" as I have grown to call them. What happened to Paul Yost, davescot and most recently, j daley and the others who leave their comments, march off in a huff, never to be heard from again. Don't they realize that results in a default in this tournament of ideas. Are they also prepared to duplicate the way proponents of the Darwinian and Fundamentalist mythologies have always responded to their critics? Are they prepared to prove that the one thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history? I have responded to what has been presented here and, if no responses ensue, I win they lose. Do they understand the rules of this very interesting game we are playing here? They may all write that down. But remember it is not just me but some of the finest minds of two centuries that have won. I still have heard nothing from the "heavyweights" and I use that term very loosely. I no longer wonder why. They are AFRAID to present their blind convictions before the clear light of the truth. They MUST NOT and for that reason alone, they CANNOT and WILL NOT. It is all so very revealing, at least to this investigator.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
"Never give in... never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense."
Winston Churchill
and so to bed.
Blastfromthepast, whoever that is, over at ISCID's brainstorms forum was kind enough to supply me with a statement by Thomas Henry Huxley aka "Darwin's Bulldog" which he found in Soren Lovtrup's book "Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth." It goes this way:
"After much consideration, and with assuredly no bias against Mr. Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction that, as the evidence stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having all the characters exhibited by species in Nature, has ever been originated by selection, whether artificial or natural."
This was written in 1860, within a year of his defense of Darwin in the famous debate with Bishop Wilberforce. Some "Bulldog" I say. Yet we still have "Darwin's Rottweiler," in the person of Sir Richard Dawkins, doggedly (no pun intended) supporting a myth which in my opinion never had anything whatever to do with creative evolution, a process, I am convinced, no longer in progress.
I am delighted to be able to lump Huxley with Berg, Broom, Osborn, Grasse, Punnett, Mivart, Lovtrup, Petrunkevitch, Davison and God only knows how many others too numerous to mention, all of whom questioned the capacity of selection to create new species.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
Thank you Blastfromthepast! Feel free to post here as well.
Nathan White
I will not debate fundamentalists of any description. In fact I won't debate anybody, especially Darwinians. I am much to busy exposing them. There is nothing to debate as both camps are dead wrong as far as I am concerned. Even if the PEH proves to be inadequate or totally wrong it will in no way rescue NeoDarwinism from oblivion. Judeo-Christian fundamentalism is not science. It is a great ethic which is all that it needs to be. I don't know why the Protestant Fundamentalists insist on making themselves so vulnerable. The Roman Church certainly has not made that mistake much to its credit. I woudn't dream of debatimg a Jesuit. Years ago I made that mistake when I foolshly told a Jesuit that Christ would have to be haploid. He responded with - Yes John but that is what makes it a true miracle. He shut me up. Of course now I know that the production of males from virgin females is commonplace in the animal kingdom and need not be considered a miracle at all. There is ample direct evidence to conclude that it may be universally true that all the necessary information for the production of both sexes is contained in the female genome. I presented that evidence in my unpublished Manifesto but it has escaped consideration which is understandable. Ideologues are like that and always have been.
The biggest mistake the IDists made was to introduce Intelligent Design for debate. Dembski is even trying to prove it mathemtically. It boggles my mind! All it did was to spawn vitriol and deprecation. ID is a given without which nothing in either ontogeny or phylogeny will ever make sense.
"Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance."
Leo Berg, Nomogenesis, page 406
I would love for Sarfati to present his case here for our collective appraisal. Why don't you suggest that to him. I am betting he won't show. Neither will Wells, Behe or Dembski, representing one camp or Dawkins, Ellsberry, and P.Z. Meyers representing the other. They are too busy insulting one another. Neither will any any of a host of other devout zealots of one or the other of the two camps unless it is to spit venom as has recently been demonstrated right here. I am content with having rejected both factions involved in the debate. Did you ever notice that debaters have teams? They sure do don't they? I am not a team man.
Thanks for posting.
Nathan White
Thank you for inviting Dawkins to, in his words, "sell his product." I believe if enough people would do the same he might show up. He has an enormous ego and I now believe he is sincere. For a long time I couldn't believe it. The important thing is that he must understand that, like anyone else, if he doesn't show he loses in this tournament of evolutionary hypotheses. I hope others will join with you and include Wells, Behe and Dembski as well. The more the merrier I say. So far, to my knowledge you are the only one to cooperate. Thank you.
"I'm an old campaigner and I love a good fight."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
And thanks for posting.
Phil Engle
The idea of new groups appearing independently in different environments is interesting. Leo Berg suggested as much:
"... affecting a vast number of individuals throughout an extensive territory."
Nomogenesis page 406
I just don't see how this could be cytogenetically possible but it may be true.
Certainly it is difficult to see marine animals appearing in terrestrial environments and vice versa. There is much about evolution that we still do not understand. What is essential is to realize that it simply is not going on any more to any significant degree. We see only the products of a long past evolution, not evolution in action as the Darwinians continue to maintain. At least that is my conviction as it was for Broom, Grasse and, of all people, Julian Huxley, the man who introduced the term "Modern Synthesis." Huxley stole the idea from Broom and then years later accused Broom of invoking the supernatural. Figure that one out if you can. A scandal to say the least.
It's hard to believe isn't it?
Thanks for posting.
To further elaborate, I always thought that evolutionary changes, which of course are genetic, must, like all other genetic changes, originate in indivdual cells. If those cells are in the germinal line and give rise to gametes those changes may be transmitted. That is why I never felt population genetics ever had anything to do with creative evolution. Population genetics only deals with the subsequent fate of genetic alterations and as far as I am concerned has and had absolutely nothing to do with their origin. Accordingly it has nothing to do with creative evolution beyond the establishment of varieties or possibly subspecies. Neither has selection, natural or artificial.
It may be that the rapid spread of a new evolutionary innovation may give the appearance of a widespread simultaneous origin but for the life of me I can't see a cytogenetic device for whole populations to instantly undergo the same transformation. Maybe others can. Berg claimed as much so I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. He proved to be correct in a number of other matters. He is one my most valued and respected sources. I certainly have not rejected his claim that there were "tens of thousands of primary forms." Can anyone? Oh yes, I forgot. Paul Yost did didn't he? But then he disappeared in the good old "hit and run " fashion I have learned to expect from members of "the establishment," as if there ever was one.
Would someone please give me Michael Ruse's email address so I can invite him too. He is definitely worthy of my attention. Thanks.
noah cronym
The answer to your question is yes. Our relationship with our living ancestors is supported by three separate criteria all of which agree, anatomy, DNA and chromosomal structure. Furthermore, the available chromosome information indicates that in all probability ALL primates are directly related and probably at some point had a common ancestor. However any particular ancestor may have given rise to new species more than once. Furthermore the same species could be produced by different ancestors. I believe George Gaylord Simpson entertained this possibility for the modern horse. It certainly is in potential concert with the PEH. How far the evidence for a strictly monophyletic evolution can be ascertained remains to be demonstrated. Maybe some members of our own species had a different immediate ancestor than some of the others. Since there are clearly preferred regions for chromosome breakage that remains a distinct possibility. That is one of the beautiful features of the PEH. It has few restraints.
In my opinion there were never very many "evolvers" if I may use that term. When evolution did take place it was typically explosive as the record so obviously indicates. The vast majority of the products were themselves incapable of further change. That is why 99.99 plus percent of all creatures that ever lived became extinct. Today I see no evidence for any "evolvers" at all. If others do they have the responsibility to demonstrate their existence. So far no one has been able to do that at least to my satisfaction. I have yet to get an answer to my challenge - show me two living true species one of which can be proven to be ancestral to the other. Organic evolution, like ontogeny, proceeded most rapidly in the beginning and has steadily declined in both rate and extent. Both terminate in death with no further change.
Someone once said that we age fastest when we are youngest. That seems to be true of evolution as well.
Once again, in the words of that 1932 ballad, "Don't Blame Me,"
blame Bateson, Punnett, Grasse, Broom and of course Julian Huxley, that Darwinian the Darwinians don't ever want to talk about. All I ever did was to agree with them all so don't blame me. Blame them!
It is hard to believe isn't it? I mean that anyone could still believe in the Darwinian fairy tale, the most failed yet persistent hypothesis in the annals of experimental and descriptive science.
"Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World."
William Golding
Two down, one to go.
I'll leave a light on for you whoever and wherever you may be.
Noah Cronym
Of course.
Well, it's after five and it's miserable outside here in the north country so, in the immortal words of Jackie Gleason:
"Ooooh, that's good booze."
Thanks for posting.
I also invited Michael Denton to present his version here of the mechanism causing the process no one has ever observed I have received no response from Dembski or Dawkins either, not even an acknowledgement that I invited them. Doesn't that suggest a certain lack of breeding? You can be certain that if someone asked me to present my thesis on their forum I would be there in a heartbeat. I think the facts speak for themselves.
So you see this critic of the two prevailing myths (please note the plural) still is not allowed to exist, thereby joining all his distinguished sources who were treated in exactly the same fashion. I no longer wonder why.
"Davison is the Darwinian's worst nightmare."
Terry Trainor
"I get no respect."
Rodney Dangerfield
"Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn."
George Bernard Shaw
Or is it the most perfect expression of fear? Naturally I prefer the latter explanation.
"Conscience doth make cowards of us all."
Shakespeare
"They can run but they can't hide."
Joe Louis
"Ooooh, how sweet it is!"
Jackie Gleason
It is hard to believe isn't it?
My friend, ally and fellow AntiDarwinian, Phil Engle, asked me a few posts back if I wouldn't be uncomfortable if I was asked what the MECHANISM was for embryonic development.
My answer is no I wouldn't. For many years one of the most important jounals in embryological research was "Wilhelm Roux's Archiv fur Entwicklungsmechanic der Organismen." It has since changed its name. Entwicklungsmechanic means developmental mechanics. I believe that every effect has a cause. That is the sense in which I use the term MECHANISM. The mechanism IS the cause and that is what we must seek as we most certainly have not yet found it for either ontogeny or phylogeny. One thing is clear however. Chance had nothing whatsoever to do with either. Both, in my opinion, were purely emergent, driven by internal "mechanisms" not yet understood.
"Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance."
Leo Berg, Nomogenesis, page 406
"However that may be, the existence of internal factors affecting evolution has to be accepted by any objective mind.."
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, page 209
So much for the "objectivity" of the Darwinian mind.
So "Don't Blame Me" for my heresies. Blame Grasse and Berg, two of the greatest biologists of their respective nations and generations. Furthermore, they reached a common conclusion completely independently or so it seems. Grasse listed Nomogenesis in his bibliography but made no reference to Berg in his text.
Let me put it this way. Long before he became senile and accused President John Kennedy of "War Crimes," Bertrand Russell had this to say:
"Ascertainable truth is partial, piecemeal, uncertain and difficult."
Nevertheless, once disclosed, truth becomes absolute, at least for this investigator.
"Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty."
Galileo
I realize that some believe that truth is only relative. I am not one of them. Apparently neither was Galileo.
I hope this helps.
I found Michael Ruse's email address and invited him to participate.
Let me bring things up to date. With respect to my "Tournament of Evolutionary Hypotheses," we have one entry, that from my fellow anti-Darwinian Phil Engle. Thank you Phil. I have received no response from Dembski, Denton or Dawkins. I just invited Ruse so I will have to wait and see.
Now what does this mean? Could it mean that these people have no convictions about the mechanism of organic evolution, have no hypothesis as to its cause and accordingly would rather not admit as much? So it would seem to me. Or could it mean that, knowing full well that I have rejected both the Darwinian and the Fundamentalist perspectives, they are unwilling to present their own interpretations for fear that they might pale in comparison? That, under the circumstances, must be considered as a possible explanation don't you think?
Let there be no question that I have very definite convictions about evolution and its causes and have introduced them here and elsewhere on the internet and in published papers, some 8 or 9.
I also have lost none of my capacity to leave unanswered terminal posts on various forums.
Over at Teleological Blog I introduced the thread "Is Evolution Finished" which enjoyed a total of 80 posts but terminated with a post which made it clear
that with Einstein I reject the notion of a personal God.
Similarly, after fdocc at "Research on Intelligent Design" was kind to introduce a lengthy summary of my evolutionary views, a spirited exchange took place but terminated abruptly when I quoted Einstein:
"The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive."
I left 12 unanswered posts at John Rennie's forum "SciAm Perspectives" following which the forum disappeared for months and reappeared in a new format in which comments are not allowed.
I mention all this because it illustrates so very well the enormous polarization which still characterizes the question of the origins and subsequent history of life which as far as we know exists only on this planet. So powerful is this polarization that when one rejects both extremes as I and others before me most certainly have done, they are summarily ignored or worse, even vilified. It seems that some of us have "spoiled the fun" for the major factions whose primary goal seem the destruction of their more visible adversary, oblivious to the possibility that they might be wrong themselves. In effect we skeptics of both the Fundamentalist and Darwinian scenarios are not allowed to exist now exactly as in the past. I must admit however that the Fundamentalist faction has been vastly more tolerant than has the Darwinian camp. They have not found it necessary to engage in character assassination, disemvowelment, isolation and wholesale denigration as has characterized such forums, among others, as Panda's Thumb, Fringe Sciences, Pharyngula and EvC.
Being by nature an experimentalist I have introduced a test of the sincerity and conviction of some of the more prominent figures in the conflict that still surounds our origins. To date I am disappointed (but not surprized) in their reticence to present their views for general consideration here in a venue expressly designed for that purpose. I let others each draw his own conclusion as I am being progressively forced to draw my own.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
"Davison is the Darwinian's worst nightmare."
Terry Trainor
I now believe it.
It looks like none of the "heavy hitters" are really interested in "selling their product" as Dawkin's has recently claimed. They are certainly missing a golden opportunity or so it seems to me.
Let me now turn to some of the minor league Darwinian players to see if I can arouse them from their dormancy. I am particularly interested in three that typify the ultra-Darwinian perspective. They are, in no particular order:
1. Scott L. Page of Norwich University. He is the one that described me as delusionary and dismissed Pierre Grasse's "Evolution of Living Organisms" as "an egomaniacal rant." Isn't that precious?
2. Wesley Elsberry, fishery biologist and proprietor of Panda's Thumb. After confining all my posts to "The Bathroom Wall," he then granted me a special thread called "Davison's Soap Box." Like all other threads at Panda's Thumb this one also went south and with it I was banned from any further participation, thus providing "the final solution to the Davison problem."
3. P.Z. Meyers, frequent contributor at Panda's Thumb who also hosts his own "Pharyngula" forum. He is the one who, in response to a comment I presented there, responded with "Your stench has preceded you," following which I was immediately banned from any further participation. Need I say more?
I also welcome comments and contributions from the participants at EvC, but I am unable to identify them by name since they nearly all, including the managers, insist on anonymity. I still don't know who "Percy" really is and it doesn't matter anyway. Needless to say I have been banned there as well, which is really unfortunate because certain other sections at EvC are very interesting. I had planned a contribution for the Mathematics group concerning the "fifth" conic section, but was denied that opportunity.
Let me say that I welcome comments from any or all of the above and I promise I will not delete anything unless it proves to threaten the integrity of the blog. Come to think of it, I don't know how to delete any comments except my own. How is that for tolerance?
I'll leave a light on for all of you but I doubt you will show up. Ideologues are like that aren't they?
I also invited Phillip Johnson to comment here. If anyone has any other suggestions, either invite them yourself or let me do it. Just provide me with their name and email address so I can add them to the list of potential players in the first annual "Tournament of Evolutionary Hypotheses."
I have set a tentative deadline of January 1, 2006. After December 25, 2005 only "Wild Card" entries will be considered.
How do like them sour ball suckers?
I just invited Michael Behe also. So far not one of either the "heavy hitters" or the "second stringers" have even acknowledged receipt of my generous offer allowing each free reign to present his evolutionary convictions for all to see and reflect upon. Only Phillip Engle has produced his essay. Thank you Phil.
Could it possibly be that others have no real convictions? Surely Dawkins must, as he says he is anxious to "sell his product."
Well, sell it here Sir Richard. I've been trying to sell my "product" for 21 years now, but no one is buying my brand and I am sure not buying yours.
Let me quote from Winston Churchill with but a single substitution which I think you will recognize"
"So they (the evolutionary establishment) go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.
That is "genetic" drift by the way, which had absolutely nothing to do with creative evolution. Got that? Write that down.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
Isn't non-existence a wonderful thing? You can say whatever you want, ridicule others with gay abandon, in short do whatever turns you on, secure that it all means nothing. Since no one seems to care about the great mystery of evolution, let me digresss for a moment and ask if there are any mathematicians out there who might be interested in my "fifth conic section." I have no intention of presenting it unless and until some soul is willing to ask what I am talking about. Got that? Write that down. In the meantime I patiently wait for signs of life from the "evolutionary establishment," as if there ever was one.
I'm a maths student so I'll bite - what fifth conic section? Circles, ellipses, parabolae, hyperbolae and...
Incidentally, you might consider adding another thread - this one's getting a bit long.
I posted a link for you on Panda's Thumb, John, but there doesn't seem to be much interest. You are rather a spent force now, and I, at least, don't see anything new here. Your comments are, however, unintentionally hilarious. I should be a bit kinder to DaveScot; he seems to be your only friend.
Alan Fox
I am hardly a spent force. The spent force is Darwinism. I am just getting warmed up. As Al Jolson once said
"You ain't heard nothin' yet."
Thanks for posting.
Lifewish
Thanks for asking. As you indicate the Greeks knew all about the four conic sections, circle, ellipse, parabola and hyperbola, but it was centuries before the fifth one was discovered by Descarte. I understand he was in bed at the time and saw a fly buzzing about in the corner of the ceiling and at that moment conceived of the coordinate system thereby making it possible to unite the geometry of the Greeks with what we now call analytical geometry. The fifth conic section is the coordinate system itself which is the limit reached when the hyperbola pairs reach the center of the two cones. Just imagine, if the Greeks had realized that, we wouldn't have had to wait centuries for Descarte to discover that which was always there just waiting to be discovered. All of science is nothing but the discovery of what was originally "prescribed" if I may use that word. Just as all of mathematics was prescribed so was all of both ontogeny and phylogeny at least according to the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis, the subject of this blog.
Thanks for posting.
Lifewish or any one else for that matter. I hate to admit this but I haven't the foggiest notion as to how to start a new thread. I warned everyone at the beginning that I was computer illiterate. If you or someone else could explain how I could introduce a new thread I would be very grateful. Please do not clutter up this blog with the instructions however. Just email me nosivadaj@msn.com
Thank you.
Alan Fox
Phillip Engel is at present my only visible ally on the internet and we have differences too.
If you posted a link to this blog at Panda's Thumb you sure put it where I can't find it. Are you sure Elsberry didn't delete it? Why don't you introduce it as a thread and really have a ball ridiculing my blog? I'll answer that for you. You haven't got the guts. Neither does Wesley Elsberry or P.Z. Meyers or anyone else at Panda's Pathetic Pollex also known as the Darwinian Alamo of the internet or, alternatively, as Elsberry's last stand.
Whom do you think you are kidding?
That's not how things work, John. Only contributors http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/
2004/03/the_crew_of_the.html
can start a thread. I did post a link to your site in a comment that you will find here.
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/
2005/12/theory_not_fact.html#comment
-62619
I doubt Wesley Elsberry will want to promote your site after you called him a Nazi. As you and DaveScot both know, PZ Myers does not suffer fools gladly either.
You could try actually explaining your theory in the lucid style of Richard Dawkins, so that we laypeople might begin to comprehend your genius. If your theory is so earth-shattering, don't you owe it to the world to let us in on the secret.
By the way, sounds like you're still well into the sauce. Why not give Al-anon a try?
So basically the fifth conic section is two intersecting straight lines? Or am I getting confused?
To start a new thread, go to http://www.blogger.com/home and click the "plus" sign by the name of your blog.
Alan Fox
First I don't have a theory. Neither does either Dawkins or any other ultra-Darwinian mystic. They all have the most failed hypothesis in the history of science. The PEH (Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis) is being supported every day with the findings from molecular biology and chromosome physiology.
I see you refuse to post a real link to my blog and until you do I will regard you as just another blowhard. If you had any real confidence in the biggest joke in science you would present your 500 words or so in defence of it instead of engaging in shabby denigration of someone who has presented a whole new thesis for organic evolution. Go back to Elsberry's Alamo and introduce a thread specifically for the ridicule of this blog. Better yet, get P.Z. Meyers to do it for you. You won't of course as you are just one more "hit and runner." Meyers won't either. He won't even show his face here where I can respond. Neither will Dembski (he won't even recognize my invitation), Behe (he is too busy writimg papers), Dawkins (I thought he wanted to "sell his product"), and as for Jonathan Wells, Michael Denton and Phillip Johnson, they haven't responded and probably won't. The simple truth is that the major leaguers on both sides of this idiotic debate are all scared fecesless of someone who has rejected both shabby mystical camps in favor of some hard headed experimental and descriptive biological realites that will never be acommodated within the mindless ideologies of either faction. So are the bush league mystics like P.Z. Meyers and Esley Welsberry. Now like a good little messemger boy, you go back to your pathetic little intellectual Alamo and tell everyone what I just said about them. I'm betting they still won't respond. Homozygous (prescribed)ideologically hide bound cowards are like that don't you know.
"War, God help me, I love it so."
General George S. Patton, with Albert Einstein and myself a confirmed determinist.
"Davison is the Darwinian's worst nightmare."
Your arch enemy, Terry Trainor
You bore me. Got that? Write that down. Now do as your told.
SLP (Scott L. Page) over at Fringe Sciences, unwilling to respond here, has instead characterized me there with "He's an imbecile." Otherwise, nothing is new.
I love it so!
lifewish
Yes is the answer to your question.
I went to where you directed me and the name of my blog does not appear there, so of course there is no plus sign next to it.
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