A Biologist's Monstrosity Yearnings

For twenty years the Edge Foundation seemed to exist mainly to publish an annual survey in which a group of people (mainly scientists) were asked some Annual Question, and wrote their answers at length.  These annual surveys were published in book form between 1998 and 2018, and you can read most of them for free on this page of the Edge Foundation's site.  Most of the financial contributions that funded the foundation came from Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire who committed suicide in jail after being charged with the sex trafficking of minors.  Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008, but he continued for quite a few years before and after that conviction to mingle with scientists and high-tech luminaries at exclusive social events such as dinner parties and cocktail parties, as his sex crimes continued.

What we always got in the yearly books answering the Annual Question were a group of people advancing an Epstein-friendly view of the world, by which I mean any viewpoint which would not trouble Jeffrey too much as he continued his predatory sex crimes (which seemed to have started long before 2008).  Typically humans would be depicted as accidental piles of chemicals rather than souls or bodies that are mysteriously arising marvels of biological organization. It was as if each of the 100+ essays in each book had been carefully chosen to avoid anything that might make Jeffrey Epstein uncomfortable.  Although occupation-wise the authors were a fairly diverse group, the books were a very monochrome affair, with almost no writers deviating from the Official Party Line of modern academia.  One of the worst examples of the Epstein-compatible viewpoints was the following appalling statement by biologist Richard Dawkins for the 2006 Annual Question:

"But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment."

During the twenty years in which the Annual Question books were being published, we seemed to have heard scarcely a peep from any professor along the lines of "I don't want to participate in some book series mainly financed by a child-abusing sex criminal."  During the same period, the contributors to the Annual Questions were marketed as some kind of brilliant elite.  A page on the Edge Foundation web site describes the contributors in these worshipful words: "scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." But the 2013 answers to the Annual Question serves as a testimony to the poor predictive powers of these supposedly brilliant minds. The question was "What Should We Be Worried About?" A great number of scientists gave not-very-brilliant answers, and virtually no mention was made of the risk of a pandemic.  The only three mentions of the word "pandemic" were passing references saying nothing substantive about pandemics. 

Among the not-very-brilliant answers given by scientists (to the question of what we should worry about) were the following:

• "One Universe" (Lawrence Krauss)
• "The Loss of Death" (Kate Jeffrey)
• "The Danger from Aliens" (Seth Shostak)
• "Can They Read My Brain?" (Stanislas Dehaene)
• "The 'Nightmare Scenario' for Fundamental Physics" (Peter Woit)

The 2006 Annual Question book featured such hilarious howlers as a chemistry professor predicting that the origin of life would be understood in five years (the year 2011), and a neuroscientist claiming that because he can use the internet,  he has "achieved omniscience for all practical purposes." There was also silliness such as the claim that "the purpose of life is to disperse energy,"  and a few statements of the evil nonsense that is free will denial. 

In 2009 the foundation's Annual Question was "What Will Change Everything?" In his answer to that question, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins speaks wistfully about some things he yearns to have, but does not have at all. 

The first thing on Dawkins' wish list is something he expresses with this odd sentence: "The discovery of relict populations of extinct hominins suchHomo erectus and Australopithecus."  I guess he meant "such as Homo erectus."   Dawkins does not explain why such a discovery (kind of like discovering a Bigfoot species) would "change everything."

The second thing on Dawkins' wish list is "a successful hybridization between a human and a chimpanzee," which Dawkins claims would send "salutary" shock waves throughout society, and "would change everything," although he quotes someone else as calling such a thing as being utterly immoral.  No such chimp-human has ever been produced, although we can understand why evolutionary biologists  (who frequently tell us the absurd falsehood that humans are apes or very apelike) would yearn for such a thing, as such a monstrosity might give some substance to their claims. 

The third thing on Dawkins' wish list is expressed by his statement below:

"What if we were to fashion a chimera of 50% human and 50% chimpanzee cells and grow it to adulthood? That would change everything."

The fourth thing on Dawkins' wish list is some silly nonsense  that suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of genomes. He states the following:

"The human genome and the chimpanzee genome are now known in full. Intermediate genomes of varying proportions can be interpolated on paper. Moving from paper to flesh and blood would require embryological technologies that will probably come on stream during the lifetime of some of my readers. I think it will be done, and an approximate reconstruction of the common ancestor of ourselves and chimpanzees will be brought to life. The intermediate genome between this reconstituted 'ancestor' and modern humans would, if implanted in an embryo, grow into something like a reborn Australopithecus: Lucy the Second. And that would (dare I say will?) change everything."

Scientists keep claiming that humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor, but no one has ever found fossils of such a common ancestor.  Since the half-life of DNA is only about 521  years, we have nothing like even a quarter genome of any hominid species that lived more than 100,000 years ago. What Dawkins fantasizes about here is someone imaginatively creating some speculative genome thought to correspond to some alleged ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, and then creating some ape-like organism from that.  But why would that "change everything"?  Such a stunt would not prove that such a genome had ever existed in the real world. 

Dawkins presupposes here the utterly false claim that erring scientists have often taught: that genomes or DNA are a blueprint or recipe for anatomy.  They are no such thing. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information, not high-level anatomical information.  Not being any specification of how to make a human, DNA does not even specify how to make any of the 200 types of cells in the human body. So the idea that you can bring back to life an extinct organism by recreating its DNA is an absurdity. This is the "Jurassic Park" fallacy.  If we were to find in some block of amber a drop of dinosaur blood containing the dinosaur's DNA, it would never allow you to bring a dinosaur back to life, because the DNA of a dinosaur does not specify how to build a dinosaur, or even how to build any one of its cells. And speculatively recreating the DNA of some alleged ancestor of humans and chimps would never allow you to bring such an organism back to life. 

Of course, Dawkins would not have all these yearnings and longings if the evidence for humans evolving from an ape-like ancestor was solid.  You only yearn for more evidence if the evidence you have is not good enough. Scientists lack any credible theory of how any very complex visible biological innovations could occur, or how any dramatic innovation of intellectual capability could occur.  The claim that Darwin advanced such a theory is merely a self-serving myth told over and over again by the tribe of legend-mongering evolutionary biologists like Dawkins, a piece of tribal folklore that serves to elevate their social status, causing us to falsely regard them as Lords of Explanation.  Darwin merely advanced a lame theory of accumulation, not a theory of organization. So the stratospheric levels of organization scientists have discovered all over the place at every level in biological organisms (almost all of which Darwin knew nothing about) are not explained by Darwinist ideas. 

The Dawkins essay mentioned above is quite like a prosecutor giving this closing argument:

"You should vote to convict Wilbur Kowalsky of murdering John Kenning, because we have established his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. But it's interesting to think of some things I wish I had. I would like to have the body of John Kenning, which no one has found.  By proving that Kenning is actually dead, that would change everything. I would also like to have some eyewitness testimony that Kowalsky killed Kenning. That would change everything. I would also like to have some motive for why Kowalsky might have killed Kenning. That would change everything. I would also like to have some evidence that Kowalsky might have ever been on the same continent as Kenning, or that he might have touched some kind of weapon that might have killed him, or that he might have been physically capable of killing him without a weapon. That would change everything! But I digress. Please convict Wilbur Kowalsky of murdering John Kenning, because we have established his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt."

When a biologist with healthy thinking is asked what he yearns for, he might say something like a cure for malaria or a cure for cancer. When a biologist's thinking is debased, he may yearn instead for monstrosities such as something half-human and half-chimp. 

In an  answer to a 2007 Annual Question of "What Are You Optimistic About?" Dawkins speaks like he was a dupe  of groundless science progress legends.  He says he is optimistic that physicists will "discover the final theory of everything." There is no truth in the  widely repeated claim that scientists are working on such a theory.  What happened was that some scientists started to engage in wild speculations about a theory that might combine two not-very-compatible things: general relativity (basically a theory of gravity) and quantum mechanics.  Such a barely-even-started theory should have been called a Theory of Two Things. But most deceptively, some scientists started calling it a Theory of Everything. It was no such thing, being a theory that did not involve chemistry, psychology, biology, history and dozens of other disciplines. Dawkins sounds as if he's bought the baloney that some physicists are working on a theory that will explain everything.  

On the same page, Dawkins says that biology went on even after "Darwin solved its deep problem." There are actually very many deep unsolved problems in biology, such as the problem of how human mental phenomena can occur despite a brain showing no signs of explaining such phenomena, how life originated, how fantastically organized anatomical innovations originated at various points in natural history, why almost all of the animal phyla originated in a relatively short time, how so many millions of types of miracle-if-it-started-by-luck protein molecules could have originated, and how a speck-sized egg is able to progress to become a full grown adult, despite the lack of any specification of anatomy in DNA.  None of these problems was  solved by Darwin. The claim that Darwin solved one of these problems by a theory of "natural selection" is as groundless as the claim that physicists are working on a Theory of Everything. And just as the phrase "Theory of Everything" is a misleading phrase, so is the phrase "natural selection," which does not actually postulate any real selection (selection being a thing performed only by conscious agents who make a choice). 

A news story at today's mainstream science news sites makes it clear that many experts have been telling us groundless stories about human origins. The news story is entitled "Most human origins stories are not compatible with known fossils."  We read the following: " 'When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it's just a big mess -- there's no consensus whatsoever,' said Sergio Almécija, a senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the review."