When it started out, Darwinism was something pretty simple: it was basically an analgesic. Various people (mainly those with atheistic tendencies) were very irritated by the idea that the biological world seemed to be filled with objects resembling the product of design rather than chance. Darwinism was like an aspirin that soothed such irritation, by assuring such people that all in biology was merely the result of chance. There were some very questionable ingredients in that analgesic, such as a not-actually-truthful slogan of "natural selection" which involved a survival-of-the-fittest effect that did involve any real choice or selection, and an excess of far-fetched speculation, unrealistic generalization, and tall-tale talk. But when someone has irritation that needs to be soothed, he often doesn't care too much about what is in the pain reliever he is taking.
As it slowly took root in the conformist social structure of the universities, Darwinism started to grow into something much more than just an analgesic. Within academia Darwinism started to grow into a kind of religion-in-all-but-name, something offering a new creation myth.
Universities are the perfect soil for the growth of stealth religions. Universities have impressive old stone buildings just like the impressive old stone buildings of the Catholic Church. And the hierarchical authority structure of universities resembles the hierarchical authority structure of the Catholic Church, with assistant professors and adjunct professors acting like nuns and deacons, full professors being like priests, assistant deans being like bishops and deans being like cardinals. Best of all, each university has its own flock of docile listeners (its student body) that resembles the attending members of a church. And while churches ususally don't command their membership to attend church every week, universities do actually command their students to spend a certain number of hours per month listening to the lessons of professors. Darwinism did qualify as a religion under the definition of religion given by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who defined a religion as "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." Darwinism lacked any deity, but some other religions such as Daoism, Confucianism, the original form of Buddhism and Scientology also had no deity.
By about 1930 Darwinism had become an impressive stealth religion that had infiltrated academia, but it was not a very exciting creed. Its gospel was basically this: "Mankind and all are other species are just accidents of blind natural forces, and let us note how wonderfully clever scientists were to have figured this out." There was nothing very exciting about such a message. Darwinism in universities was very closely entangled for decades with an interesting program of eugenics that claimed to offer a "how to make the world better" agenda. However, such an agenda became rather radioactive once it was discovered how horribly the Nazis had used similar ideas.
But things started to get more interesting when people started to ramp Darwinian ideas up to a galactic level. The basic idea was: let's imagine blind Darwinian evolution occurring not just on Earth, but on planets all over the galaxy. The real leader in such a leap of imagination was Hollywood. There were three great leaps propelling us into a world of fantasy.
- First there was the seminal 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. It told a fascinating story of interstellar astronauts in the 23rd century who used a faster-than-light starship to reach the distant planet Altair IV, a life-bearing revolving around another star. The story involved a scientist (Dr. Mobius) who was studying a race that used to inhabit Altair IV, and reached god-like powers before mysteriously becoming extinct.
- Then there was the 1965-1968 TV series Star Trek, which involved space travelers such as Kirk, McCoy and Spock very conveniently traveling around the galaxy in a starship that could travel at "warp speeds" much faster than the speed of light. The galaxy depicted was incredibly convenient, for it seemed that almost always when visting a new planet, Kirk, McCoy and Spock found the planet well-inhabited by life, with conditions so hospitable that these astronauts almost never even needed to wear a spacesuit or even put on a light jacket. The Star Trek series spawned innumerable movie and TV spin-offs in the decades that followed. Another TV series running in the 1960's (Lost in Space) depicted astronauts shuttling around from inhabited planet to inhabited planet with similar convenience.
- Then there was the wildly popular 1977 movie Star Wars, the first in an almost endless series of sequels and prequels. Although set in another galaxy, the movie carried the "convenient interstellar travel" theme to a rather ridiculous extreme, by imagining instantaneous interstellar travel by means of wormhole travel involving "jumping through hyperspace."
Claims of galactic Darwinists |
Reality |
“The stuff of life is all over the place in outer space. The galaxy is teeming with the building blocks of life.” |
The building blocks of macroscopic life are cells, and the building blocks of microscopic life are functional proteins. Neither cells nor functional proteins have ever been detected in space. The building blocks of the building blocks of life are the 20 amino acids used by living things, and the four nucleotides used by living things. None of those 24 things has ever been found in outer space, with the exception of one or two of them (glycine and alanine), which have merely been detected in no more than the tiniest microscopic trace amounts. |
“Experiments show that the building blocks of life would naturally arise.” |
No experiment realistically simulating the early Earth has ever produced either the building blocks of microscopic life (protein molecules) nor any of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids or nucleotides). The Miller-Urey experiment failed in multiple ways to realistically simulate early Earth conditions. |
“The galaxy is filled with planets.” |
Correct, and the number of planets may be a few times greater than the number of stars in the galaxy (about 200 billion). |
“Scientists have already discovered Earth-like planets revolving around other stars.” |
No claim should ever be made that scientists have discovered an Earth-like planet until life has been found on another planet, which has not occurred. |
“Many of the planets already discovered could support life as well as Earth does.” |
In a recent news article we read, “None of the potentially habitable Earth-like exoplanets known to astronomers today have the right conditions to sustain life as we know it on Earth, with a rich biosphere of plants, microbes and animals, a new study has found.” |
“Life will arise whenever conditions are right on a planet.” |
To the contrary, everything we have learned about the very great organization and complexity of even the simplest living things suggests that the natural origin of life should be impossible, and should be as unlikely as a thrown deck of cards accidentally forming into a house of cards consisting of 52 cards. The concept of abiogenesis (that life can naturally arise from non-life) is a concept with zero observational and experimental support. |
“Once life gets started, it will evolve into large complex organisms such as mammals.” |
There is no credible theory explaining how microscopic life could evolve into incredibly organized large organisms such as mammals. Darwinism fails to explain a jump from prokaryotic cells to vastly more organized eukaryotic cells. Darwinism fails to credibly explain the origin of the many millions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom (each its own very complex invention too unlikely to appear by any natural process), and also fails to credibly explain the origin of anatomical innovations (which cannot be explained by changes in DNA, since DNA does not specify anatomy). |
“We should expect that on a large fraction of the planets with life, intelligent life has arisen." |
Humans are completely lacking in any credible natural explanation for the arising of intelligence on our planet. Claims that the appearance of intelligent conscious beings can be explained by an increase in brain size are untenable. None of the main characteristics of human minds can be credibly explained as being caused by brain activity. Scientists have no understanding of how neurons could produce thought, understanding, consciousness or self-hood. Scientists have no credible explanation for such basic human mental phenomena as the instant formation of memories, the 50-year preservation of memories, and the instant recall of rarely remembered things learned long ago. The low-level facts scientists have learned about the brain and synapses reveal them as things with very high instability, very rapid molecular turnover, very high levels of noise, very high signal slowing factors and signal transmission unreliability, factors which make the brain untenable as a source of human mentality. Therefore we lack any sound basis for predicting how often intelligent life would appear on some planet on which life existed. |
“Astrobiologists agree that the galaxy is filled with intelligent beings.” |
Appeals to a majority of opinion in some small group of specialists are unpersuasive, because such groups are very prone to groupthink, and some unwarranted belief dogma may become an expected norm in some research community, an orthodoxy which it is heresy to defy. If 100% of astrobiologists believed that life in the galaxy is common, this would no more prove such a thing than papal infallibility is proven by 100% of Catholic bishops believing in such a doctrine. Moreover, the only way to reliably measure the opinions of some group is to do secret ballots, and people don't do secret ballots of scientists asking them about their beliefs on scientific topics. So we don't actually know whether most astrobiologists believe extraterrestrial life is common. |
“Humans must be one of the most primitive of the intelligent species in the galaxy. Extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy are mostly vastly older than mankind.” |
Civilizations vastly older than humanity would presumably have god-like technological powers. But we see no sign of such god-like powers at work in our galaxy. The galaxy looks as it would look if Earth was the only planet with a civilization. The predicted Dyson Spheres have not been found. |
“It is the height of arrogance for us to believe that we are the the most advanced race in the galaxy when there are so many other planets.” |
Many chances does not mean many successes, and if something is sufficiently improbable, it won't happen even if there are trillions or quadrillions of chances for it to happen. If the chance of intelligent life naturally arising on a planet is much less than 1 in a trillion (and there are many reasons for thinking that it is), then it is reasonable to conclude that there are probably no other intelligent races in our galaxy, unless some intelligent agency is acting to produce such races. Such a conclusion is straightforward mathematical reasoning involving no arrogance at all. |
“We will find proof of extraterrestrial civilizations once we start seriously looking for radio signals from them.” |
Well-funded efforts to detect radio signals and optical signals from other planets have been going on for decades, and have not produced any evidence for extraterrestrials. |
“Fast travel around the galaxy should be possible by craft using warp drives or space-time- wormholes.” |
Warp drives and space-time wormholes are fantasy. It is a law of nature that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So traveling from one star to the nearest star should always take about five years or more, probably very much longer because of the difficulty of building any spaceship capable of reaching even half of the speed of light. |
“We are the most primitive intelligent species in the galaxy.” |
While it is possible that there are many other intelligent species in our galaxy (particularly if some intelligent causal agency is working to produce such species), as far as we know we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy. |
“UFOs show that there are other extraterrestrials in our galaxy.” |
We have no evidence that UFOs are from other planets in our galaxy, and there are various alternate possible explanations (some paranormal) for UFOs. If any UFO is from another planet, that does not prove that life can arise on such a planet by Darwinian processes. |
Hallo Mark. Can i ask you what do you think of this article?
ReplyDeletehttps://mindmatters.ai/2021/10/brain-cells-can-mislead-each-other-cause-mental-disorders/
I find it perplexing and i would like to read a comment from you, if you want, of course.
The article in Mind Matters talks about some very speculative paper that makes conjectures not strongly supported by any observations in the paper. The paper authors are engaging in some speculations trying to back up the synaptic theory of memory. See my blog www.headtruth.blogspot.com for a discussion of numerous reasons for rejecting such a theory. Two of the biggest are the instability of synapses and their related dendritic spines, and the fact that signals only travel across chemical synapses with a transmission probability of 50% or less. Crossing even one cubic millimeter of cortex tissue would require crossings of many synaptic gaps, each with a probability of less than 50%. As a result, information could not be reliably transmitted. Similarly, if your email has to be routed through 10 servers each of which of which fails 50% of the time, your message would not get through. The article quotes a bit of nonsense that neuroscientists like to speak: the claim that memory results from synapse strengthening. That idea makes no sense. Information is stored when something is written, never when something is merely strengthened. Why don't neuroscientists typically claim that memories are written to the brain? Because there's nothing in the brain resembling something that could either write to brain tissue or read from brain tissue. Strengthening is not information storage, and when neuroscientists claim that memories are formed by synapse strengthening, they are revealing the emptiness of their ideas on this topic.
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