Stranger Than Science.... Not Really.... Science Matters.... But Nothing Will Matter On The Day Strange Matters Are Set Loose

Jesus spoke of the day of destruction but for the sake of the elect, the Earth will not be destroyed and it shall have  a thousand years of peace.

STRANGE MATTERS

Miraculous accidents

7. Chance, creation and design

Miraculous accidents

Darwinists believe that one type of creature can eventually evolve into a completely different type of creature through genetic changes that are totally random and purposeless. Consider the transition from land reptiles to fish:

[A]s ordinary land reptiles ventured into the water, ... they now needed fish-like tails. Obligingly, with no possible knowledge that such was needed, random, accidental mutations altered the incredibly complex genetic apparatus that had produced reptiles in such a way that beautifully designed, marvellously functional fish-like tails were produced on a reptile previously floundering awkwardly around in the water. Likewise, feet and legs were no longer useful for propulsion in water, and so the vast complex of genes that coded for all the structures in feet and legs was somehow, a mutation here, a mutation there, transformed miraculously into the incredible complex of genes required to code for the tendons, blood vessels, nervous system, muscles, bones, and other structures, all arranged in a precise way, to constitute the paddles now highly efficient for propulsion in water. It is evident that, in spite of fervent denials, evolutionists do believe, even in miracles.¹

To transform a reptile into a mammal, all sorts of radical changes would be required. Darwinists believe that this transition is very well documented by the fossil record, which shows certain therapsids (mammal-like reptiles) becoming increasingly mammal-like in the course of the Triassic. Reptiles have multiple jaw bones and a single bone in the ear, while mammals have a single jaw bone and three in the ear. The gradual reconfiguration of these structures, via the intermediate stage of a double jaw joint, is attributed to a long series of random mutations; most were harmful, but some produced just the right changes, so that the surviving creatures could continue to chew and hear. The essential organ of hearing in the mammal is the extremely complicated organ of Corti, which no reptile possesses. At the same time, many other marvellous new physiological and anatomical organs and processes had to be invented, such as a new mode of reproduction, mammary glands, temperature regulation, hair, and a new way of breathing (including a diaphragm). Hair develops from complex follicles deep in the dermal layer of skin, quite unlike reptilian scales, their presumed precursors. Mammary glands (the source of the name ‘mammals’) allegedly evolved from sweat glands (missing in reptiles) and milk from sweat. It’s unclear what happened to mammal babies during the supposed slow transition from a thin, watery, salty solution of urea and various toxins to a thick, nutritious liquid rich in protein, sugar, fat and antibodies.²

Fig. 7.1. The organ of Corti contains rows of sensory hair cells, which generate nerve impulses in response to sound vibrations.³

For the mammalian reproductive system to function properly, the following features, among others, must all be present: ovary and testes to manufacture ova and sperm, each of which must have only half the normal number of chromosomes; the male body must have a mechanism for implanting the sperm in the female’s body; sperm cells must have the ability and instinct to seek out the waiting ovum; the ovum must accept a single sperm, and then block the entry of any further sperm; the sperm cell must unite with the ovum in a way that ensures ordered blending of the nuclear chromosomes and genes; the fertilized ovum must initiate cell division and proliferation; the growing embryo must acquire a placenta and umbilicus to conduct blood and waste products between mother and embryo; the fetus must be expelled from the womb at full term; mammary glands are needed to supply liquid nourishment to the newborn babe. All these features could hardly be the outcome of a slow accumulation of genetic copying mishaps. To paraphrase Gould: What good is half a penis? Or a sperm without a tail? The entire reproductive system would have to appear all at once in perfect working order.
As indicated earlier, many Darwinists have now resorted to invoking regulatory genes as a magical solution to every problem. For instance, Michael Schwartz writes:

If fins become limbs with feet at their ends merely through the turning on of homeobox genes in novel locations and the insertion of a short molecular sequence into one particular homeobox gene, then the evolution of primate hands and feet would be an even simpler evolutionary feat.⁴

In other words, a regulatory gene is switched on here and adjusted there and hey presto – hands and feet appear! The origin of the regulatory gene system itself, and any mutations that regulatory and structural genes undergo, are of course attributed to blind chance.
The living world presents endless fascinating examples of ingenious designs that expose the sheer idiocy of standard Darwinian explanations. The butterfly, for instance, starts life as a tiny hard-shelled egg within which an embryo grows and eats its way out to become a caterpillar, which proceeds to gorge itself on vegetation. When fully grown, the caterpillar sheds its skin for the last time, and changes into a pupa or chrysalis containing an amorphous mass of tissues, which somehow rebuilds itself into a totally different structure with a totally different lifestyle. It is surely an insult to our intelligence to insist that the mysterious metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly could have originated by fortuitous genetic mutations. But as Michael Behe says, ‘In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys ...’⁵
The electric eel, typically growing to about 2 metres long, has three abdominal pairs of organs that produce electricity, extending four-fifths of the length of its body. They are composed of 5000 to 6000 stacked electroplates and can produce a shock of up to 500 volts. All the various components have to be present for the system to work; without the insulating fatty layer, for example, the eel would electrocute itself. Darwin himself admitted: ‘The electric organs of fishes offer another case of special difficulty; it is impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced.’⁶
Or consider the bombardier beetle, half an inch in length, which is equipped for its defence with a miniature liquid-fuel rocket engine. The beetle stores hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide in an internal reservoir, from which the mixtures can be pumped into a reaction chamber containing enzymes. The valve is closed, and the explosive reaction at 100°C forces the spray out through a turretlike orifice in the beetle’s rear end, which sends it in any desired direction. This complex defence mechanism along with the instincts needed to operate it could hardly be the result of gradual, random evolution.
The flatworm called Microstomum also has a remarkable defence system. When it is attacked, defensive cells called nematocysts, just beneath the surface of the worm’s back, are discharged and sting the attacker. The worms obtain their nematocysts from hydras; normally they avoid hydras, but when they need more nematocysts, they eat them and digest all their tissues except these particular cells. After the nematocysts have been enclosed within certain of the flatworm’s cells, those designed to fire coiled or sticky threads are digested, while those that fire poisonous barbs are transported to sites just beneath the outer layer of the worm’s back, where they are oriented so that their stings will fire upward. The cells forming the worm’s outer layer become very thin just above the nematocysts, providing portholes for the firing of the stings. Finally, the cells encapsulating the nematocysts undergo extensive changes that enable these cells to act as trigger mechanisms.⁷
There are countless puzzling examples of mimicry in the plant and animal worlds. For instance, the aardwolf resembles the striped hyena – an aggressive animal that most predators avoid. The aardwolf possesses an erectile mane along its back that makes it appear much larger than it really is and enhances its resemblance to the hyena. The similarities even extend to the aardwolf’s internal anatomy. How did random mutations and natural selection manage to accomplish this?

Fig. 7.2. The aardwolf (top) mimics the striped hyena (bottom).⁸

Fig. 7.3. A Philippine anglerfish, looking just like a rock or shell, waves a piece of bait resembling a small fish which is found in that region. The bait, which is part of its body, has fins, a tail, and black spots for eyes. The bait attracts predatory fish close enough for the anglerfish to snap them up.9

Irreducible complexity

In Darwin’s time the cell was believed to be a ‘homogeneous globule of protoplasm’, but it is now known to contain systems of mind-boggling complexity. Some cells swim using a cilium, a structure that looks like a hair and beats like a whip. Cilia are very complicated molecular machines, containing about 200 different kinds of protein parts. It is an example of what Michael Behe calls an ‘irreducibly complex system’ – i.e. a system which ceases to function if any one of its interrelated parts is removed. Such systems, he says, cannot be produced in the gradual, step-by-step manner that Darwin envisaged, and would have to arise all at once.
Another irreducibly complex system is the rotatory flagellum – a sort of outboard motor that some bacteria use to swim. Some flagella turn at more than 1000 revolutions per second. The device includes a long tail that acts as a propeller; the hook region, which attaches the propeller to the drive shaft; the motor, which uses a flow of acid from outside the bacterium to the inside to power the turning; a stator, which keeps the structure stationary in the plane of the membrane while the propeller turns; and bushing material to allow the drive shaft to poke up through the bacterial membrane. In the absence of the hook, the motor, the propeller, the drive shaft, or most of the 40 types of proteins necessary for the construction and operation of the flagellum, either no flagellum is produced or one that does not work at all.¹

Fig. 7.4. Drawing of a bacterial flagellum showing the filament, hook, and the motor imbedded in the inner and outer cell membranes and the cell wall.²

Other examples of irreducible complexity include vision, blood clotting and the intracellular protein transport system. Behe points out that the technical literature is essentially silent when it comes to explaining in any detail how such intricate systems might have evolved in a Darwinian fashion; most of the papers in molecular biology journals are concerned with DNA sequence analysis. On the subject of the flagellum, Simon Conway Morris writes:

While we should not underestimate the difficulty in explaining how such a flagellar motor might have evolved, everything else we know about evolution indicates that the pathway to construction will involve the twin processes of cobbling together and co-option, with at least some of the proteins being recruited in quite surprising ways from some other function elsewhere in the cell.³

In other word, Morris has nothing to offer but a pious hope.
Darwin admitted that the belief that an organ as perfect as the eye could have been formed by natural selection is ‘enough to stagger anyone’, but appealed to the enormous period of time available. Even more staggering is the current belief that camera-type eyes (like our own) evolved randomly and independently at least seven times. Like Darwin, Richard Dawkins thinks that the eye evolved step by step through a series of intermediate stages. But note that improvements in the structure of the eye are useless unless they go hand in hand with improved neural processing. And even the ‘light-sensitive spot’ that Dawkins takes as his starting point is a multicell organ, each of whose cells makes the complexity of a motorcycle or television look paltry in comparison. Dawkins merely adds complex systems to complex systems and calls that an explanation. Behe comments:

This can be compared to answering the question ‘How is a stereo system made?’ with the words ‘By plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier, and adding a CD player, radio receiver, and tape deck.’⁴

Fig. 7.5. Cross-section of the human eye. The retina has 130 million light-sensitive rods and cones, which cause photochemical reactions that transform light into electrical impulses. About a billion impulses are transmitted to the brain every second, by means that are poorly understood.

Behe illustrates the complexity of vision with the following rather technical but still highly simplified description: When a photon hits the retina, it interacts with a small organic molecule called cis-retinal, causing its rather bent shape to straighten out. This changes the shape of the protein rhodopsin, which is bound to it, and exposes a binding site that allows the protein transducin to stick to it. Part of the transducin complex now dissociates and interacts with a protein called phosphodiesterase, which then acquires the ability to cut a molecule called cyclic-GMP and turn it into 5'-GMP. Some of this sticks to another protein called an ion channel. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions into the cell, but when the concentration of cyclic-GMP decreases because of the action of the phosphodiesterase, the cyclic-GMP bound to the ion channel eventually falls off, causing a change in shape that shuts the channel. As a result, sodium ions can no longer enter the cell, the concentration of sodium in the cell decreases, and the voltage across the cell membrane changes. That in turn causes a wave of electrical polarization to be sent down the optic nerve to the brain. The system then has to regenerate and return to the starting point ready for the next incoming photon.⁵ When the electrical signals are processed, integrated and interpreted by the brain (and mind), vision results.
Michael Schwartz believes that by invoking regulatory genes, the need for an elaborate account of the eye’s origin and complexity disappears:

[T]he reasons lie in knowing that there are homeobox genes for eye formation and that when one of them, the Rxgene in particular, is activated in the right place and at the right time, an individual has an eye.⁶

A more vacuous Darwinian ‘explanation’ is difficult to imagine!

God and imperfection

In the early 19th century, Anglican priest William Paley argued that if we found a watch on the ground we would assume its various parts had been designed and put together for a purpose. He went on to argue that highly complex living systems, too, must have been designed. Supporters of the modern intelligent design (ID) movement argue that intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell, because only intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of functionally specified information. Michael Behe argues that random mutations and natural selection play a role in evolution, but that ‘design is evident when a number of separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components’.¹ Intelligent design is also invoked to explain the vast chain of coincidences that make life on earth possible – e.g. the relative strengths of the four physical forces, the ratio between strong and weak chemical bonds, the thermal properties of water, and the properties of the earth’s atmosphere. If the ‘laws of physics’ had been only slightly different, carbon-based life would be impossible.² Darwinists reject the intelligent-design hypothesis as untestable and unfalsifiable, and therefore pseudoscience. However, the same charge can be levelled against the neo-Darwinian hypothesis that the entire living world originated through random mutations and natural selection.
The ID movement leaves open the question of the identity of the designer or designers, whether they are natural or ‘supernatural’, and how their designs are imprinted on matter. ID advocates disagree about the reality of common ancestry. Many are Christian theists (some of whom are creationists), and believe that there is only one designer/creator: the hypothetical omnipotent and omniscient God of orthodox Christian theology. Biblical creationists accept that genetic variation (microevolution) is constantly taking place, but reject macroevolution and the theory of common descent. They do not believe that God intervenes by planning and directing mutations to accomplish large-scale evolutionary changes. At various times in the past, God supposedly created each new kind of creature out of nothing by supernatural means, so that these newly created beings appeared on earth abruptly and fully developed. A 2012 survey found that 46% of Americans believe that ‘God created human beings in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years’.³
Darwinists argue that since there are flaws in the designs of creatures we see on earth, they cannot be the product of an intelligent agent – this is known as the ‘argument from imperfection’. As S.J. Gould put it, ‘Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.’ His favourite example was the panda’s thumb. The giant panda has a thumb that it uses to grasp the bamboo shoots that form its main diet. However, its thumb is not one of the five fingers of the normal mammalian paw. Instead, it is an extra digit constructed from a modified wrist bone, with appropriate rearrangement of the musculature. Gould assumes that a designer would have given the panda a real opposable thumb, and concludes that the panda’s thumb must have evolved by Darwinian means.⁴
However, it is impossible to disprove design on the basis of unprovable assumptions about how a hypothetical designer would or would not act. As Behe says, the designer might have multiple motives, with engineering excellence often relegated to a secondary role. Furthermore, the fact that living systems are not perfect does not prove that there is no design at all and that random Darwinian evolution is a fact. Note that Gould fails to provide an adequate Darwinian explanation of how the Panda’s thumb evolved:

He simply states that a single change in a regulatory gene, which controls the action of many structural genes, was responsible for the whole complex development of bone and muscle. But he does not specify which regulatory gene changed, nor does he explain how a change in the regulatory gene would orchestrate this remarkable transformation. He offers nothing more than the traditional vague magic-wand explanation.⁵

ID proponents, including creationists, respond to the argument from imperfection by trying to show that alleged ‘imperfect’ designs are actually sophisticated engineering feats or they regard them as the product of degeneration of a rational and beneficial original design. Take the human eye, for example. Darwinists argue that the vertebrate eye is a botched design as it is wired backward: the photoreceptors face away from the light, resulting in a ‘blind spot’. ID proponents point out that positioning the nerves in front of the light-sensitive retinal cells ensures maximum blood supply to the retina and therefore maximum sensitivity. Whether the eye is perfect or not, the fact remains that ‘The scientific literature contains no evidence that natural selection working on mutation can produce either an eye with a blind spot, an eye without a blind spot, an eyelid, a lens, a retina, rhodopsin, or retinal.’⁶
Robert Wesson draws attention to many odd and seemingly illogical features in the living world. The human body, for example, is ill adapted in many ways:

The body is a bundle of imperfections, with sagging bellies, drooping breasts, useless protuberances above the nostrils, rotting teeth with trouble-prone third molars, aching feet, bulging buttocks, easily strained backs, and naked tender skin, subject to cuts, bites, and, for many, sunburn. We are poor runners and are only about a third as strong as chimpanzees smaller than ourselves.⁷

However, these relatively minor defects do not prove that the body arose from chance mutations and random selection. From a theosophical point of view, the entities embodying in physical forms get the body they need to gain the experiences and learn the lessons necessary for their evolutionary progress. Evolving, imperfect souls are unlikely to have absolutely perfect bodies, and the misuse by humans of their free will is the root cause of a multitude of ailments.
Evolutionists have argued that the forelimbs of turtles, horses, humans, birds and bats are less than perfectly adapted because they are modified from an inherited structure rather than designed from completely ‘raw’ materials for a specific purpose. But the mere fact that vertebrate forelimbs are modifications of the same basic design is no proof of anything. It is certainly compatible with intelligent design, for why shouldn’t designers – who need not be omnipotent – produce new features in organisms by modifying existing ones?
Behe, who describes himself as ‘a pretty conventional Roman Catholic’, believes there is a single intelligent designer, ‘beyond nature’, but that it is also responsible for creating ‘a torrent of pain’ and ‘untold human misery’. He asks: ‘Are viruses and parasites part of some brilliant, as-yet-unappreciated economy of nature, or do they reflect the bungling of an incompetent, fallible designer?’⁸ Other believers in a benevolent intelligent designer predict that genetic studies will reveal that virulent bacteria are degenerative systems resulting from loss of original genetic information.⁹
Features that have no apparent use at all are also cited as evidence against design. For instance, less than 5% of the DNA in most plants and animals codes for proteins; the remainder was originally labelled ‘junk DNA’ or ‘pseudogenes’. Darwinists argued that this non-functional DNA confirmed that genes mutated randomly, resulting in a genome riddled with useless information, mistakes and broken genes. However, it has been known for decades that many non-protein-coding sequences do have important functions, such as encoding RNA molecules involved in the regulation of gene expression. It has also been suggested that some of this DNA may consist of ‘redundant’ ancestral genes that are no longer expressed, or that it may contain information for future evolutionary events. The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project infers that at least 80% of human DNA serves some biochemical purpose, though some scientists disagree.¹⁰

Monotheism vs. creative powers

Many people are unable to reconcile the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, perfect creator with the suffering, imperfections and waste in nature. The gnostics, for example, argued that God must have been

an inferior deity, a builder, receiving his ‘orders,’ so to say, from the divine architects ... [T]he manifold imperfections and incompletenesses so plainly apparent even to us humans, in the kosmical system, proclaim that it could not be the work of an all-perfect and kosmically omnipotent Deity; from utter perfection could spring forth only a perfect and complete work.¹

Monotheists might argue that God chose to create a potentially perfect universe, but endowed each soul with a measure of free will, which can be used for good or ill. However, this explanation is insufficient, for if God determines the character and circumstances of birth of each new soul he supposedly creates, he would be responsible for many of the numerous apparent injustices in the human and animal worlds – which would surely reflect rather badly on him.

There are further objections to the traditional theological concept of God. If God is infinite and has always existed ‘he’ is an abstraction and cannot be a thinking, creating being; a being is by definition finite and limited, a learning entity, and certainly not all-powerful and all-wise. An infinite God could not be entirely separate from the physical universe, but would be synonymous with infinite nature. To conceive of God as existing outside the cosmos is therefore illogical, and the idea of God creating the universe and everything within it out of literally nothing is simply absurd: nothing can come from nothing, and therefore infinite nature must always have existed – whatever creationists and big-bang cosmologists may claim.²
Instead of a single supreme creator-god, more sophisticated forms of creationism hold that a wide range of spiritual and other nonphysical beings are involved in the process of ‘creation’.³ In contrast to strict creationism, other researchers and mystical traditions propose that there is a physical evolutionary process, but they go beyond strict Darwinism by proposing that this process is guided and directed by hierarchies of paraphysical entities.
19th-century naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, for example, parted company with his contemporary, Charles Darwin, after coming to the conclusion that unaided natural selection was unable to account for the physical form of humans and that the guiding action of ‘higher intelligences’ was a ‘necessary part of the great laws which govern the material Universe’.⁴ 20th-century anthropologist Robert Broom believed that various spiritual and psychic agencies were at work in guiding and controlling evolution, some benevolent and some malignant.⁵
Alexander Mebane proposes that a variety of subdivine designers guide the process of saltational evolution. He suggests that the abundance of weirdly fantastic life forms and lifestyles indicates that the designers have always competed with one another.⁶ Robert Gilson proposes that the ultimate ‘all-wise and all-powerful’ divine source delegates most of the work of creation to a vast hierarchy of subordinate but largely autonomous powers. These nonphysical agencies bring about genetic mutations, but the lower ranks may make errors.⁷ Both Mebane and Gilson seem to imply that the designers work predominantly selfconsciously.
Philosopher Thomas Nagel recognizes that the materialistic, reductionist Darwinian paradigm has failed to explain the origin and evolution of life, and the existence of consciousness, cognition and our moral sense, purely in terms of purposeless physicochemical laws and a long series of accidents. Rejecting the idea of an intelligent agency outside the natural order, he hopes that new ‘principles’ that are ‘teleological rather than mechanistic’ will eventually be discovered.⁸ There certainly appear to be purposeful processes at work in nature, but invoking abstract teleological principles does not help to explain them – it’s real, natural, but predominantly nonphysical forces, energies, entities and intelligences that are required.
The ageless wisdom tradition postulates an interlinked series of nonphysical worlds and entities behind the workings of the physical world, as echoed in many religious and philosophical systems. Christianity, for instance, speaks of angels, archangels, dominions, principalities, etc. And in the first verse of Genesis – ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ – the word normally translated as ‘God’ is actually a plural word, elohim, meaning ‘gods’ (el means ‘god’, eloh means ‘goddess’, and -im is the masculine plural ending). The word translated as ‘created’ is a reflexive verb signifying that the androgynous creative powers made or formed themselves into, i.e. became, the spiritual realms and the material realm.⁹ The elohim are clearly not equivalent to boundless infinitude, which is referred to in the second verse as ‘the deep’ (tehom), corresponding to the ayn soph of the kabbalists, the shunyata of the Buddhists, and the parabrahman of the Hindus.
The most detailed and accessible presentation of the ancient wisdom is to be found in modern theosophy. The theosophical teachings on evolution given out since the formation of the Theosophical Society in 1875 are merely a general outline of the information in the possession of the Brotherhood of Adepts.¹⁰ This information is said to have been compiled and repeatedly verified by countless generations of sages and seers, whose occult powers grant them access to the inner realms of nature and enable them to read the records of the earth’s history clairvoyantly.

References

Miraculous accidents

1. Duane T. Gish, Evolution: The fossils still say no!, El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1995, pp. 104-5.
2. Ibid., pp. 167-73; John D. Morris and Frank J. Sherwin, The Fossil Record: Unearthing nature’s history of life, Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research, 2010, p. 154.
3. ‘Ear, human’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, CD-ROM 2004.
4. Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, genes, and the emergence of species, New York: John Wiley, 1999, p. 38.
5. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The biochemical challenge to evolution, New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 23.
6. Balázs Hornyánszky and István Tasi, Nature’s I.Q., Badger, CA: Torchlight Publishing, 2009, p. 66;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_eel.
7. Richard L. Thompson, Mechanistic and Nonmechanistic Science: An investigation into the nature of consciousness and form, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1981, pp. 193-5.
8. William R. Corliss (comp.), Biological Anomalies: Mammals I, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1995, p. 17.
9. William R. Corliss (comp.), Science Frontiers: Some anomalies and curiosities of nature, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1994, p. 154.

Irreducible complexity

1. Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000, pp. 123-4, 134-5; Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The search for the limits of Darwinism, New York: Free Press, 2008, pp. 261-8.
2. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 71.
3. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable humans in a lonely universe, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 111.
4. Darwin’s Black Box, p. 39.
5. Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, pp. 117-9; Darwin’s Black Box, pp. 18-22.
6. Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p. 362.

God and imperfection

1. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 194.
2. See Michael J. Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the laws of biology reveal purpose in the universe, New York: Free Press, 1998.
3. gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx.
4. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 20.
5. Sri Ramesvara Swami (ed.), Origins: Higher dimensions in science, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1984, p. 47.
6. James P. Gills and Tom Woodward, Darwinism under the Microscope: How recent scientific evidence points to divine design, Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2002, pp. 151-9; Darwin’s Black Box, p. 224.
7. Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p. 95.
8. Behe, The Edge of Evolution, pp. 228, 232, 237-8.
9. Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for intelligent design, New York: HarperOne, 2009, pp. 490-1.
10. Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design, New York: HarperOne, 2013, pp. 400-2; Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The hypothesis of formative causation, London: Icon Books, 3rd ed., 2009, p. 180; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA.

Monotheism vs. creative powers

1. G. de Purucker, Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press (TUP), 2nd ed., 1979, p. 509.
2. See Trends in cosmology, http://davidpratt.info.
3. See Michael A. Cremo, Human Devolution: A Vedic alternative to Darwin’s theory, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, 2003.
4. Quoted in H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, TUP, 1977 (1888), 1:339.
5. R. Broom, The Coming of Man, London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1933, pp. 11-2, 196-8, 220-5.
6. Alexander Mebane, Darwin’s Creation-Myth, Venice, FL: P&D Printing, 1994, pp. 69-70.
7. Robert J. Gilson, Evolution in a New Light: The outworking of cosmic imaginism, Norwich: Pelegrin Trust, 1992, pp. 99-109, 122.
8. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
9. G. de Purucker, Studies in Occult Philosophy, TUP, 1973, pp. 129-33; Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, pp. 95-104.
10. See The mahatmas, http://davidpratt.info.

An article published by David Pratt. @  http://davidpratt.info/evod1.htm

Jesus Said There Are Two Gods: You Will Either Love One Or Hate The Other

Is this just another conspiracy theory? Or is a loosely compiled overview of how the  lieutenants are permitted to connive their own fortunes? The thesis of this documentary is the lieutenants are doing the bidding of the generals who finance them in the background.

The Bush Dynasty Legacy

An advertisment reads: Young, ambitious, immoral, malleable person to become a politician...Richard Nixon applies and gets his break.

https://youtu.be/U1Qt6a-vaNM?t=3699

Evidence of tampering of Zapruda film of JFK murder. Very convincing.

https://youtu.be/U1Qt6a-vaNM?t=6985

Many claim the evidence appears that this is a film designed to give the impression that the world is influenced by (and conflicts in particular hinge on) the CIA being in cohorts with the Mafia, with a few references to Rothschild and Royals.

References are made to the ruling elite using religion and terrorism as a means to distract the multitude to the main game. Those at the top of the ruling class enjoy their freedoms and only those who play the game their way are admitted into the changing rooms. 

Conclusion:

Conolly is saying that the ruling elite are using the ruse of terrorism to make profits through arms manufacture and illegal drugs. By so doing, they possess the means to retain wealth and power and control the population. Nothing has changed since the days of Julius Caesar. 

One matter that is overlooked is that unless there is a population of people to purchase the goods grown or manufactured, there are no profits to be made. What this means is that while a ruling elite might like to govern the world and do what they like, unless there are sufficient people consuming product, who are earning an income, no profits can be made. 

Jesus said that there is the god of mammon and the God of the Universe. Covetousness is another name for the god of this world. As a being is, so is he, the god "Covetousness" is usually known as Satan, Lucifer, the Devil, the Ancient Serpent.

An afterthought:
The question that needs asking is What is the ideal number of people for the Earth's population. Some say 500 million.  The devil is always in the details, the fine print, and what is left unsaid. What do you think? 

Big Gaps In Evolution Explained

 

Saltation, symbiosis, self-organization

Punctuated equilibrium

 The theory of punctuated equilibrium was proposed in the early 1970s by palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, soon to be joined by Stephen Stanley. It postulates that, instead of undergoing continuous evolutionary change, species remain in a state of unchanging equilibrium for most of their existence. But these long periods of stability or stasis are occasionally punctuated by brief bursts of rapid evolution in which new species emerge – so quickly geologically speaking (i.e. within a few tens of thousands of years) that no finely graded sequence of intermediate forms is preserved in the fossil record.

 Standard evolutionary theory recognizes that a new species may branch off from an existing one very quickly – a process known a quantum speciation – but only in special circumstances; punctuated equilibrium suggests that rapid speciation is the rule rather than the exception. Most evolutionists are vigorously opposed to this theory, and continue to attribute the lack of transitional fossils to the imperfection of the fossil record. There have been heated and sometimes nasty debates between gradualists and punctuationists. Gradualists have called punctuationism ‘evolution by jerks’, while punctuationists have called gradualism ‘evolution by creeps’!

Punctuationists argue that rapid speciation events occur in small populations that have become geographically isolated. This has the advantage that it is easier for genetic traits to become fixed in a population, the smaller it is. At the same time, however, random genetic drift is greatest in small populations, which makes the accumulation of favourable mutations more unlikely. The theory also claims that speciation happens so fast that there is no time for nonadaptive mutations to be eliminated by natural selection. It holds that, rather than individual organisms being selected, entire new species survive or perish depending on their degree of adaptation to the environment they find themselves in. Critics maintain that species (or allopatric) selection cannot account for the degree of adaptation observed in the fossil record.

Punctuationism was originally put forward as a radical alternative theory to neo-Darwinian gradualism, which Gould declared to be ‘effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy’. However, from the early 1980s, in the face of criticism, punctuationists began to moderate their statements. Gould (who died in 2002) eventually acknowledged that new anatomical traits are generated by the standard neo-Darwinian mechanism – natural selection acting on random mutations over long periods of time in large, relatively stable populations. This meant that the theory could no longer explain the abrupt emergence of animal forms, such as the explosive appearance of new body plans in the Cambrian. So while the punctuationists highlighted some of the failings of neo-Darwinism, they ultimately failed to offer a satisfactory alternative explanation for the origin of biological form and novelty.¹ Palaeontologists James Valentine and Douglas Erwin concluded in 1987 that neither phyletic gradualism nor punctuated equilibrium could explain the origin of new body plans.²

The hypothesis that a species can rapidly evolve into a new species as a result of purely random genetic mutations is far-fetched, especially since genes do not explain morphogenesis. Furthermore, the punctuationist scheme offers no solution for the really serious problem of the absence of transitional forms between the higher categories of organisms – families, orders, classes and phyla. Michael Denton writes:

The gaps which separate species: dog/fox, rat/mouse etc. are utterly trivial compared with, say, that between a primitive terrestrial mammal and a whale or a primitive terrestrial reptile and an Ichthyosaur; and even these relatively major discontinuities are trivial alongside those which divide major phyla such as molluscs and arthropods. Such major discontinuities simply could not, unless we are to believe in miracles, have been crossed in geologically short periods of time through one or two transitional species occupying restricted geographical areas. Surely, such transitions must have involved long lineages including many collateral lines of hundreds or probably thousands of transitional species ... To suggest that the hundreds, thousands or possibly even millions of transitional species which must have existed in the interval between vastly dissimilar types were all unsuccessful species occupying isolated areas and having very small population numbers is verging on the incredible!³

Saltation

A number of influential biologists have seen large-scale mutations, or macromutations, as the most likely way in which new types of organisms have emerged. A saltational theory of evolution was proposed in the 1930s by palaeontologist Otto Schindewolf, who even speculated that at one time a reptile laid an egg from which a bird hatched. In the 1940s geneticist Richard Goldschmidt developed this theory further. Macromutations would give rise to ‘monsters’, most of which would be unviable and perish, but occasionally a ‘hopeful monster’ would appear which would be preadapted to a new environmental niche and become a successful new species. Such events would account for all the major gaps in the fossil record. Goldschmidt was excommunicated by the Darwinist establishment and regarded as a lunatic for the rest of his life.
Critics objected that when major mutational changes appear in the laboratory, they involve errors in the formation or placement of old parts – e.g. a leg coming out of a fruit fly’s head – and never the appearance of a new organ. Ernst Mayr described these mutation-generated monsters as ‘hopeless’, and Theodosius Dobzhansky said that the idea that a drastic mutation would produce a viable new type was equivalent to a ‘belief in miracles’. No macromutations leading to positive results or the emergence of a viable new species have ever been observed. Moreover, even if a much improved animal were to appear, it would find no mate, unless similar macromutations occurred in a male and female individual at the same time – which does not double the improbability, but squares it. If saltational events have occurred, it is quite untenable to suppose that they occurred by mere chance.
Gould defended Goldschmidt’s postulate that major structural transitions can occur rapidly (and supposedly randomly) without a smooth series of intermediate stages:

All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. ... Even though we have no direct evidence for smooth transitions, can we invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate forms – that is, viable, functioning organisms – between ancestors and descendants in major structural transitions? Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?

The conventional reply to this, says Gould, is that incipient stages in the development of a new organ performed a different function from the one they later came to fulfil: ‘The half jaw worked perfectly well as a series of gill-supporting bones; the half wing may have trapped prey or controlled body temperature.’ But he suspected that this approach could not save gradualism in most cases.¹

Fig. 6.1. Darwinists speculate that feathers originally evolved for heat insulation (though hair would have been much simpler to evolve and would have done the job just as well). They also claim that the proto-wings of proto-birds may have been used for capturing insects before they became suitable for flight.²

Regulatory genes to the rescue

Like Goldschmidt, Gould believed that most large evolutionary changes are brought about by small alterations in rates of development:

the problem of reconciling evident discontinuity in macroevolution with Darwinism is largely solved by the observation that small changes early in embryology accumulate through growth to yield profound differences among adults. ... Indeed, if we do not invoke discontinuous change by small alteration in rates of development, I do not see how most major evolutionary transitions can be accomplished at all. Few systems are more resistant to basic change than the strongly differentiated, highly specified, complex adults of ‘higher’ animal groups. How could we ever convert an adult rhinoceros or a mosquito into something fundamentally different?¹

He believed that neoteny – the retention of the juvenile features of an ancestral species in the adult form of a descendant species, as a result of a slowdown in the rate of physical maturation – ‘provides one of the few mechanisms for rapid and profound evolutionary change in a Darwinian fashion without the specter of macromutation. A descendant with a mixture of ancestral juvenile and adult characters ... may immediately enter a new adaptive zone; yet the genetic input need involve no more than some changes in regulatory genes ...’²
Jeffrey Schwartz, too, invokes changes in regulatory genes (such as homeobox genes) and their activities as the key to the sudden emergence of new morphological designs and new species. He argues that the concept of macromutations can be dispensed with, since micromutations in regulatory genes can have major, macroevolutionary effects. He writes: ‘The activation of homeobox gene expression in novel positions or in novel combinations at different times certainly produces significant changes.’³ But he adheres to the core Darwinist belief that nothing but chance determines which regulatory genes are activated or deactivated, and when and where this occurs.
Each individual possesses two copies of each gene, which may be the same or different; if they are different, one copy will be dominant and the other recessive or unexpressed. Nonlethal genetic mutations are usually recessive to start with, and Schwartz argues that at some point, after they have been inherited by many members of the species, regulatory genes, ‘by a mechanism that remains unclear’, activate the recessive mutated genes and deactivate certain other genes, leading to the abrupt appearance of a new organ, or perhaps a new species.⁴ Regulatory genes themselves also undergo random mutations, which may turn them on or off, or may duplicate or change them slightly. Schwartz recognizes that most of these random changes would lead nowhere and assumes that ‘The evolution of life is probably strewn with the carcasses of failed species’.⁵However, there is no evidence that there have been any such failures, and the idea that all these alleged random happenings could somehow produce a feather, an eye, a kidney, an echolocation system, let alone a completely new plant or animal, places great strains on our credulity. A hundred years of mutagenesis experiments show that mutations affecting early body-plan development invariably result in abnormal or dead animals; this is because each regulatory gene coordinates the expression of numerous other genes.

Moreover, as pointed out earlier, regulatory genes no more explain morphogenesis than do structural genes. It is true that the order and location in which particular regulatory genes are switched on and off are correlated with the development of particular structures. But no one has ever shown that regulatory genes, or any other genes, carry instructions that determine the form of developing organs and organisms. Changes during embryonic development could certainly produce far-reaching effects, but they would need to unfold in a planned and purposeful manner. According to the theosophic tradition, such changes reflect prior changes in the astral body, which provides the template for embryonic and postnatal physical development.

Symbiosis

The first living organisms on earth are thought to have been bacteria, which consist of a single prokaryotic cell (i.e. a cell without a nucleus). They are said to have evolved further partly by random mutations and partly by transferring genes from one to another (known as DNA recombination). Around 2 billion years ago, larger and more complex eukaryotic cells (i.e. nucleated cells) appeared, the first unicellular eukaryotic organisms being the protists. All later, multicellular organisms – animals, plants and fungi – consist of eukaryotic cells.

Lynn Margulis attributed these major evolutionary innovations to symbiosis – the widespread tendency of different organisms to live in close association with one another and often inside one another (like the bacteria in our intestines). The most intimate form of symbiosis is the incorporation and integration of the genes of one species (mostly bacteria and other microbes) into the genome of another, giving rise to a new species – a process known as symbiogenesis. She saw symbiogenesis as the principal avenue of evolution, and said that random genetic mutations, which are ‘nearly always inconsequential or detrimental to the work as a whole’, have been ‘dogmatically overemphasized’ by neo-Darwinists.¹ 

Margulis argued that mitochondria, the powerhouses inside most nucleated cells, were once free-floating bacteria, and that in the distant past a larger cell either swallowed or was invaded by a bacterium, but instead of digesting it or being killed by it, they began to cooperate and the invading cell eventually became a mitochondrion. This proposal was initially greeted with ridicule but is now widely accepted, though it has never been experimentally demonstrated. Margulis also suggested that the flagella or fringe of cilia used by eukaryotes to propel themselves through the water were once the rapidly swimming bacteria called spirochetes, which accidentally attached themselves to other prokaryotes and progressively lost their distinct traits; and that the chloroplasts in plant cells used to be cyanobacteria which for some reason were spared digestion by plant ancestors. These chance alliances, ‘encouraged’ by environmental pressures, allegedly gave rise to the internally elaborate eukaryotic cells, which then diversified through random variation and selection, and eventually formed symbiotic alliances with one another, thereby producing the first multicellular organisms. 

Note that, like genetic mutations, all the changes involved in the integration of the genes of one organism into the genome of another organism are supposed to take place randomly, i.e. without any overall guidance or purpose. Michael Behe raises a further objection: ‘The essence of symbiosis is the joining of two separate cells, or two separate systems, both of which are already functioning. ... Neither Margulis nor anyone else has offered a detailed explanation of how the preexisting cells originated.’² And as Ernst Mayr pointed out, ‘There is no indication that any of the 10,000 species of birds or the 4,500 species of mammals originated by symbiogenesis.’³ The large-scale, undirected exchange of genetic material between unrelated individuals is just as incapable of explaining the history of life on earth as any other random mechanism.

Self-organization and self-engineering

Stuart Kauffman, a leading proponent of complexity theory, argues that the origins of life, metabolism, genetic programmes and body plans are all beyond Darwinian explanation but may arise spontaneously through self-organization. This refers to the tendency of complex systems to spontaneously organize themselves into ordered patterns; ‘perturbations’ of a system can sometimes cause it to switch from one pattern to another. It’s true that many systems do sometimes seem to ‘spontaneously’ organize themselves, but saying that self-organization is driven by ‘laws of complexity’ is useless, since scientific laws do not cause or explain natural phenomena; they merely describe them.
Complexity theory is heavily mathematical and is unconnected to real-life chemistry. No proponent of complexity theory has ever gone into a laboratory, mixed a large variety of chemicals in a test tube, and looked to see if self-sustaining metabolic pathways spontaneously organize themselves. Many origin-of-life scientists have already tried such experiments – without any notable success. There is no evidence that either biological information or complex anatomical structures can arise from physics and chemistry alone. Self-organization remains a vague and fuzzy concept, and the theory excels mainly at generating computer graphics rather than explaining anything. Critics have accused Kauffman of practising ‘fact-free science’ and indulging in ‘cyberfantasy’. 

Robert Wesson is another scientist who recognizes that evolution involves more than just random variation and natural selection. He holds that it also involves self-organization, and that the emergence of a new species is directed by ‘internal factors’. The essence of self-organization, he says, is the ‘attractor’, which somehow guides the development of a new organ or instinct in a particular direction. He claims that thinking in these terms ‘makes extraordinary adaptations more understandable’.¹ The truth, however, is that ‘attractors’ is no more than an empty word. 

Like Wesson with his ‘attractors’, many other scientists have felt compelled to invoke all sorts of new ‘laws’ and ‘organizing principles’ to explain the amazing diversity, creativity and ingenuity of life. Michael Denton, for example, speaks of ‘a preordained pattern, written into the laws of nature from the beginning’.² Paul Davies says that in addition to the laws of physics, there are ‘general organizing principles that supervise the behavior of complex systems at higher organizational levels’.³ Systems theorist Fritjof Capra says that there is an ‘inherent tendency’ in nature towards the ‘spontaneous emergence of increasing order and complexity’.⁴ But as already noted, ‘laws of nature’, ‘organizing principles’ and ‘inherent tendencies’ are purely descriptive terms and explain nothing. 

Molecular biologist James Shapiro invokes ‘natural genetic engineering’ to explain how novelty is created in the course of evolution.⁵ He rejects the traditional view that the genome is a read-only memory system subject to change by accidental damage and copying errors, and shows in great detail that cells are able to ‘rewrite’ their own genomes, especially in response to outside stresses:

Living cells and organisms are cognitive (sentient) entities that act and interact purposefully to ensure survival, growth, and proliferation. They possess corresponding sensory, communication, information-processing, and decision-making capabilities. Cells are built to evolve; they have the ability to alter their hereditary characteristics rapidly through well-described natural genetic engineering and epigenetic processes as well as by cell mergers. Evolutionary novelty arises from the production of new cell and multicellular structures as a result of cellular self-modification functions and cell fusions.⁶

According to Shapiro, ‘The DNA record definitely does not support the slow accumulation of random gradual changes transmitted by restricted patterns of vertical descent.’⁷ There is abundant evidence that horizontal DNA transfer has played a key role in evolution; organisms can quickly co-opt structures from other organisms and re-engineer them. ‘The data’, he says, ‘are overwhelmingly in favor of the saltationist school that postulated major genomic changes at key moments in evolution.’⁸ He does not explain the origin of the first cell or of cells’ ‘cognitive’ abilities. 

Many biologists fiercely oppose the concept of natural genetic engineering, and the idea of ‘cell cognition, decision-making, and goal-oriented function’, because they feel it implies an engineer and therefore supports intelligent design. Willam Dembski, a proponent of intelligent design, remarks:

Organisms that can do their own natural genetic engineering are themselves marvels of engineering. We need to be engineers even to understand them. Moreover, the engineering feats they accomplish vastly overshadow human technological prowess. So why should it be a stretch to think that such systems are themselves the result of engineering?⁹

Shapiro rejects the idea of a ‘guiding intelligence outside of nature’. So does the theosophic worldview, for nothing can be outside of infinite nature; it also recognizes that the universe is pervaded by mind and intelligence, manifesting in many different degrees in all manner of life forms (including cells), but that consciousness cannot be reduced to the operations of physical matter.

Morphic fields

Rupert Sheldrake goes a step further by recognizing the need for nonphysical causal factors – which he calls morphic fields. These include morphogenetic fields (which guide the development and maintenance of the bodies of organisms), motor fields (which organize movements), behavioural fields (which organize habitual and instinctive behaviour), mental fields (associated with conscious and unconscious mental activity), and social and cultural fields. He argues that natural systems at all levels of complexity – from atoms to organisms and societies of organisms – are animated, organized and coordinated by these fields, which contain an inherent memory. Natural systems inherit this collective memory from all previous things of their kind by ‘morphic resonance’; what happens therefore depends on what has happened before. 

During embryogenesis, groups of relatively unspecialized cells act as ‘morphogenetic germs’ that tune into the morphogenetic fields that guide the development of particular bodily structures. A given type of morphogenesis usually follows a particular developmental pathway, but may also proceed towards the final form from different morphogenetic germs and by different pathways, as shown by organisms’ ability to repair themselves after damage. If unusual environmental conditions or genetic changes alter the structure of a germ sufficiently, it may become associated with a different morphogenetic field or no field at all. The pattern of gene activity controlled by homeotic genes affects a whole pathway of morphogenesis. Mutations in these genes affect the tuning of morphogenetic germs to particular morphogenetic fields, just as an alternation to a transistor or condenser in a tuning circuit could cause a television to tune into a different channel or to lose the ability to tune into any channel at all. 

Evolution, says Sheldrake, ‘involves more than a change in gene frequencies: it involves the natural selection and stabilization of patterns of organization brought about by morphic fields. These fields themselves evolve.’¹ He argues that the origin of new morphic fields could be ascribed to chance, or to creativity inherent in nature, or to a transcendent creative agency. He says that morphic fields never completely vanish when the species or entity they organize dies but continue to exist as ‘potential organizing patterns of influence’, and that this explains why the same evolutionary pathways are sometimes repeated. 

To some extent, morphic fields correspond to the inner, subtler bodies or souls postulated in mystic traditions, and the morphic field of Gaia corresponds to the subtler (astral and akashic) planes interpenetrating our physical globe. But Sheldrake’s concept of morphic fields is extremely hazy. He describes them as ‘fields of information’, saying that they are not a type of matter or energy and are detectable only by their effects on material systems. However, if morphic fields were absolutely nonmaterial, they would be pure nothingness and therefore devoid of any explanatory power. It is more logical to conceive of them as finer, nonphysical patterns of energy-substance, too ethereal to be detectable by scientific instruments.² 

Instead of a physical world organized by nebulous nonmaterial ‘fields’, theosophy proposes the existence of a whole spectrum of paraphysical forces and entities, ranging from elemental nature-forces to spiritual intelligences. The idea that there are subtler energies and entities at work makes more sense than the belief that there are abstract ‘laws’ and ‘principles’ floating around, magically creating order out of chaos, or that chance and spontaneity just happen to be creative. From a theosophical viewpoint, the physical world and everything within it are organized and guided from within outwards, and are self-organizing only if ‘self’ is taken to include supraphysical levels of their constitution.
The notion of inner planes of existence does not of course ‘explain’ things in the sense of offering an ‘ultimate answer’; after all, we could then enquire after the properties of these subtler states of energy-substance, the characteristics of the various entities that populate the unseen realms, and the way in which these supraphysical factors influence and interact with the physical world. The point is simply that if we do in fact live in a multilevelled reality, as many ‘anomalous’ phenomena imply, then paraphysical forces and entities will inevitably play a role in evolution too. The basic principle is that whatever is happening on any particular plane is influenced by subtler forces connected with inner planes, rather than by absolutely nonmaterial ‘laws’, ‘principles’, ‘fields’, etc.³

References

Punctuated equilibrium

1. Walter J. ReMine, The Biotic Message: Evolution versus message theory, Saint Paul, MN: St. Paul Science, 1993, pp. 328-31; Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design, New York: HarperOne, 2013, pp. 138-51.
2. Darwin’s Doubt, p. 151.
3. Michael Denton, Evolution: A theory in crisis, Bethesda, MA: Adler & Adler, 1986, pp. 193-4.

Saltation

1. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 157.
2. Denton, Evolution: A theory in crisis, p. 209.

Regulatory genes to the rescue

1. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 160.
2. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1977, p. 284.
3. Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, genes, and the emergence of species, New York: John Wiley, 1999, p. 348.
4. Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz, Extinct Humans, New York: Nevraumont, 2001, pp. 46-9.
5. Sudden Origins, p. 373.

Symbiosis

1. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A theory of the origins of species, New York: Basic Books, 2002, p. 15.
2. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 189.
3. Foreword to Acquiring Genomes, p. xiii.

Self-organization and self-engineering

1. Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p. 170.
2. Michael J. Denton, Nature’s Destiny, New York: Free Press, 1998, p. 282.
3. Paul Davies, The Mind of God, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 182.
4. Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, London: Flamingo, 1997, p. 222.
5. James A. Shapiro, Evolution: A view from the 21st century, Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press Science, 2011; Casey Luskin, ‘James Shapiro’s Evolution: A View from the 21st Century offers a stunning look at biological complexity and non-Darwinian evolution’, 29 Aug. 2011, evolutionnews.org; James A. Shapiro, ‘“Is James Shapiro a design theorist?”: James Shapiro replies’, 16 Jan. 2012, evolutionnews.org.
6. Evolution: A view from the 21st century, p. 143.
7. Ibid., p. 126.
8. Ibid., p. 89.
9. William A. Dembski, ‘Borderline heretic: James Shapiro and his 21st century view of evolution’, 2012,designinference.com.

Morphic fields

1. Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature, New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 285.
2. See Rupert Sheldrake: a theosophical appraisal, http://davidpratt.info.
3. See Worlds within worlds, http://davidpratt.info.

An article published by David Pratt. @  http://davidpratt.info/evod1.htm

Explosive Evidence That Cover Ups Are Really Happening And Americans Are Mugs

The American Society of Civil Engineers are complicit in 9/11 because they did not insist on finding out what caused the twin towers to fall.

 In this feature length documentary with cutting-edge 9/11 evidence from more than 50 top experts in their fields - high-rise architects, structural engineers, physicists, chemical engineers, firefighters, metallurgists, explosives experts, controlled demolition technicians, and more.

Each is highly qualified in his/her respective fields. Several have Ph.D's - including National Medal of Science awardee Lynn Margulis.

She, along with the other experts, exposes the fraud of NIST and discusses how the scientific method should have been applied and acknowledges the overwhelming evidence of high temperature incendiaries in all dust samples of the WTC.

High-rise architects and structural engineers layout the evidence in the features of the destruction of these three high-rises that point inevitably to explosive controlled demolition.

Common Descent, Common Design and Common Myths

Common descent and common design

Classification

Taxonomy, or systematics, is the science of biological classification, and seeks to arrange plants and animals into hierarchies of superior and subordinate groups on the basis of the features they have in common. Branching diagrams (cladograms) are drawn up showing the affinities between different species, and many taxonomists then interpret each node where a new branch begins as representing a hypothetical common ancestor. Alec Panchen says that common descent ‘seems so obviously the correct answer to the apparent relationships of classification, that any rejection of that explanation must surely be due to ignorance, stupidity or prejudice’.¹ However, the father of modern taxonomy, the 18th-century botanist Carl Linnaeus, considered the ease with which plants and animals fell into an orderly groups-within-groups system of classification, or nested hierarchy, to be evidence for design.

Fig. 5.1. A cladogram.

Fig. 5.2. Four examples of more than seven competing cladograms for the supposed transformation of fish into tetrapods.²

A group of dissident scientists, called ‘transformed cladists’ by their opponents, reject the hypothesis of common ancestry as unnecessary and see cladograms solely as a representation of a natural hierarchy of characteristics. Although they reject the a priori assumption of ancestor-descendant sequences (phylogeny), and express notable dissatisfaction with evolutionary theory and methods, most transformed cladists are in fact evolutionists, even though their peers regard them as traitors. They merely recognize that virtually all groups, living or extinct, are already too specialized to be reasonably called directly ‘ancestral’ to any other, and that none of the logically required truly ancestral forms are to be found in the fossil record. Only the outer twigs on the supposed evolutionary tree can be verified; the ancestral forms constituting its trunk and boughs are missing. As Gareth Nelson and Norman Platnick wrote in 1984: ‘We believe that Darwinism is a theory that has been put to the test in biological systematics, and has been found false.’³
Since the fossil record has not provided any substantial evidence of the evolutionary tree of descent that Darwinists expected to find, they now often speak of a labyrinthine ‘bush’. They acknowledge, however, that it is often difficult to judge where any given fossil falls among the many branches of the tree or bush. Robert Wesson writes:

Charts depicting ancestries through the ages are sometimes fudged by drawing connections where they are assumed; the more honest ones have dotted lines.
The gaps in the record are real ... The absence of a record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt.⁴

And Ernst Mayr says:

It comes as rather a surprise to most nontaxonomists how uncertain our understanding of degrees of relationship among organisms still is today. For instance, it is still unknown for most orders of birds which other order is a given order’s nearest relative. The same is true for many mammalian families and genera ...Yet these uncertainties in the classification of higher vertebrates are very minor compared to those of the invertebrates, the lower plants, and most of all, the prokaryotes and viruses.⁵

David Raup points out that many scientists think the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it really is due to oversimplified textbooks, semipopular articles, etc. plus wishful thinking; ‘some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks,’ he says. Various ‘tricks’ are used to strengthen the impression of Darwinian descent. For instance, some authors display a series of fossils which show a progression in morphology, but which are not chronologically successive, and therefore cannot be evolutionary sequences. Alternatively, a chronologically successive series of teeth, jaw bones, etc. may be displayed as an evolutionary sequence, even though the author may know that the body parts are from organisms that could not reasonably have formed a lineage.⁶

Homology, convergence and parallelism

Similarities in the structure, physiology or development of different species are said to be homologous if they are attributable to descent from a common ancestor. For instance, the forelimbs of humans, whales, dogs and bats are regarded as homologous, i.e. derived from an ancestor with similarly arranged forelimbs. Corresponding features with similar functions that are not thought to have originated by common descent are said to be analogous (or homoplasious). Examples are the wings of birds and flies, which are believed to have developed independently.
‘Homologous’ structures are supposed to have initially originated by the random accumulation of tiny advantageous mutations, and then to have been inherited by descendant species and further adapted, thanks to natural selection of further random mutations. ‘Analogous’ structures, on the other hand, are supposed to have arisen by random mutations several times and entirely independently – this is called convergent or parallel evolution. Parallel evolution refers to the appearance of similar patterns in more or less closely related plant and animal species, while convergent evolution refers to the appearance of striking similarities among organisms only very distantly related, but the boundary between the two terms is blurred.
Convergent evolution demonstrates that similarity does not always imply homology, i.e. inheritance from a common ancestor. There are many cases where similar features once classed as homologous have later been reclassified as analogous. Moreover, traits controlled by identical genes are not necessarily homologous and homologous structures need not be controlled by identical genes. Regulatory genes that are considered homologous may be dedicated to non-homologous morphology. There are many examples where homologous structures develop via completely different embryological routes. For instance, the alimentary canal is formed from the roof of the embryonic gut cavity in sharks, from the floor in the lamprey, from the roof and floor in frogs, and from the lower layer of the blastoderm in birds and reptiles.¹
There are hosts of convergences in the plant world. Very similar leaf patterns, for example, have appeared again and again in separate genera and families. Green plants depend for their survival on photosynthesis, whereby sunlight is used to convert water and carbon dioxide into energy-rich carbohydrates. 3% of plants use C₄ photosynthesis, in which CO₂ is first fixed into a four-carbon acid with the aid of an enzyme called PEPC. These acids then diffuse to the cells in an airtight structure known as the bundle sheath, where they are broken down into CO₂ molecules, after which photosynthesis proceeds as normal. This highly complex and efficient process allows plants to grow faster and use less water. According to Williams et al., ‘C₄photosynthesis has independently evolved from the ancestral C₃ pathway in at least 60 plant lineages, but, as with other complex traits, how it evolved is unclear.’²

Fig. 5.3. Three species of South American butterflies which closely mimic each other, even though they belong to distinct families: Melinaea lilis imitata, Helinconius ismenius telchinia, Dismorphia amphione praxinoe.³ Many close similarities are found in the wing colouration patterns of butterflies, both within and between families.

Fig. 5.4. Convergent evolution of the raptorial foreleg of the praying mantis and an insect known as Mantispa. It is derived from a generalized insect leg, modified for catching and grasping prey. It also evolved independently in a third group of insects, the rhachiberothidids.⁴

A striking example of convergent evolution is provided by the two main branches of the mammals, the placentals and marsupials, which have supposedly followed independent evolutionary pathways, after splitting off from some primitive mammalian common ancestor in the late Cretaceous. (Placentals bear their young fully developed, while marsupials give birth prematurely and nurture their young in a pouch.) The marsupials of Australia have evolved in isolation from placental mammals elsewhere yet have given rise to a whole range of similar forms: pouched versions of anteaters, moles, flying squirrels, cats, wolves, etc. Much the same phenomenon occurred in South America, where marsupials independently gave rise to a range of parallel forms.

Fig. 5.5. Examples of convergence: placental and marsupial mouse, placental wolf and marsupial Tasmanian wolf, marsupial flying phalanger and placental flying squirrel.

Fig. 5.6. Convergence in the sabre-tooth: drawing by Carl Buell of the placental Smilodon (top) and the marsupialThylacosmilus.⁵

The eye has appeared many times in unrelated groups of animals. There are two main types of eye: the compound eye found in arthropods, and the camera eye. The camera eye has evolved independently at least seven times – in mammals (e.g. humans), cephalopods (e.g. squid and octopus), certain annelid worms, cubozoans (a form of jellyfish), and three separate forms of snail. Wings allegedly evolved independently no less than four times: in insects, flying reptiles, birds and bats. Electrogeneration in fish has appeared independently at least six times and in each case involved the modification of muscle cells. Bioluminescence – the ability of creatures to produce their own light with chemicals – is said to have evolved independently 40 to 50 times. The whale, dolphin, extinct ichthyosaurus of the Mesozoic, and shark all look similar, yet the shark is a fish, the ichthyosaurus was an aquatic reptile, and the whale and dolphin are mammals. Other convergences include the production of silk threads by spiders, silk moths, larval caddis flies and weaver ants, sonar-like echolocation systems in microbats, toothed whales and shrews, and warm-bloodedness in birds, mammals and certain fish.

Fig. 5.7. Convergence of the camera eye in humans (vertebrate) and the octopus (cephalopod). The eyes are ‘wired’ differently: in humans light passes through the nerves on the way to the photoreceptors (retina), whereas in the octopus it does not. 1 = retina; 2 = nerve fibres; 3 = optic nerve; 4 = blind spot in humans, caused by nerve fibres passing through the retina.

Palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris has catalogued the extraordinary variety of convergences in animals and plants. He says that the extent and importance of convergence have been consistently underestimated, and that most examples are known only to specialists. Descriptions of convergences are full of adjectives like ‘remarkable’, ‘striking’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘astonishing’ and ‘uncanny’. Morris says that ‘there is almost a feeling of unease in the similarities’, and that some biologists ‘sense the ghost of teleology looking over their shoulders’. Life, he says, ‘shows a kind of homing instinct’;⁶ the ubiquity of convergence ‘means that life is not only predictable at a basic level, it also has direction’.⁷ But he has no explanation other than the standard neo-Darwinian tale that similar forms and structures evolve because random mutations are sifted by similar selection pressures, and because there may be only a very limited number of ways of solving particular challenges (e.g. designing an eye). However, it is difficult enough to imagine how a complex organ or organism could have evolved even once by a combination of thousands of randomly generated ‘beneficial’ mutations; the idea that it could have happened more than once beggars belief. Moreover, when related species independently evolve similar physical traits they sometimes use the same genes to do so – which deals a further blow to the idea that evolution is essentially a random process.⁸
Numerous examples from the fossil record therefore suggest that particular evolutionary pathways are repeated: organisms with features almost identical to previous species appear again and again. Instead of thinking in terms of random mutations, it seems more reasonable to suppose that records of past features and structures are stored in some way, and that these records can be tapped into and modified during the design of later creatures.

Embryology

Vertebrate embryos pass through a series of similar stages in early development. As Rupert Sheldrake explains:

The early stages of embryology often resemble those of numerous other species, or even families and orders. As development proceeds, the particular features of the order, family, genus and finally species tend to appear sequentially and the relatively minor differences that distinguish the individual organism from other individuals of the same species generally appear last.¹

In 1866 Ernst Haeckel formulated the ‘biogenetic law’, which states that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, meaning that embryological development recapitulates ancestry. He argued that an organism evolves by tacking on new stages to its process of embryonic development, so that as an organism passes through embryonic development it retraces every adult stage of its evolutionary ancestors. Biologists soon discarded the idea that evolution is limited to changes added at the end of the development process, and took the view that evolution can affect all phases of development, removing developmental steps as well as adding them, so that embryology is not a strict replay of ancestry.

Fig. 5.8. Above: Haeckel’s infamous drawings of vertebrate embryos. Left to right: fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, pig, cow, rabbit, human. Haeckel had modified his drawings to make their early stages appear more alike than they really are. Below: Photos of (from top to bottom) a human, pig, chick, and fish embryo at similar stages of development.2

The embryo starts as a single cell, then divides into a tiny multicellular ball. A mammal embryo continues through stages resembling fish and reptiles before finishing as a fully formed mammalian youngster. Comparative embryology shows how different adult structures of many animals have the same embryonic precursors. Darwinists interpret these shared developmental features as evidence that many animals have ancestors in common; closely related animals show more similarities than more distantly related animals. For instance, at a certain stage of development, vertebrate embryos develop pharyngeal pouches resembling the gill pouches found in fish, though these features are never functioning gills, not even in embryonic fish. These features then go on to develop into very different adult structures – gills in the fish, and ear, jaw and pharynx in the mammal. This is interpreted to mean that all mammals share a common ancestor whose embryo had pharyngeal pouches.
Theosophy agrees that embryology provides information about evolutionary history, but rejects the Darwinian notion that every new type of organism arose through the continuous transformation of physical ancestors (see section 8). It should be noted that materialistic science cannot truly explain any aspect of embryonic development. For example, how does an embryo know when to stop making liver cells and to start making kidney cells? Chemical signals are believed to trigger the changes, switching certain combinations of genes on and off at just the right moments – but this raises more questions than it answers. Moreover, no known genetic mechanism explains morphogenesis or how organisms are able to retain a memory of ‘ancestral’ forms.
Another way of looking at embryological development is expressed in Von Baer’s laws, which were formulated before Haeckel’s biogenetic law. They indicate that the most generalized characters tend to appear earliest in ontogeny, followed by less generalized characters and finally the most specialized. This means that those structures that develop early in the embryo are common to many different species, whereas structures that develop late in the embryo are the ones that can be used to distinguish between species. In other words, life forms tend to begin near a common point and diverge outward, each on its own unique path, like the diverging spokes of a wheel. Von Baer was a creationist and formulated this law in opposition to evolution, but Darwinists believe that the stage of development at which two species diverge depends on how closely they are related – the assumption being that the only way they can be related is by physical descent. Theosophy postulates the existence of astral root-types, which were then developed in many different directions – not in a random fashion, but guided by nature’s instinctive intelligence.
Darwinists find further evidence of common descent in ‘vestigial organs’, which they view as the remains of what were once fully functional organs in the evolutionary ancestors of the species concerned. Some organs once labelled ‘vestigial’ have been shown to perform useful functions, e.g. the appendix. The human coccyx (tailbone) is seen as a vestigial tail and evidence that some of our ancestors had a tail.³ The remains of a hip girdle and hind limbs in whales, and the reduced hind limbs of primitive snakes are interpreted as incomplete modifications of the structures of their ancestors. But this sort of evidence is also compatible with some kind of conscious design, since modification of certain basic structures would be more efficient than designing everything from scratch. Moreover, the lack of any substantial fossil evidence for gradual evolutionary change is consistent with the theosophical view that the preparations for new physical features and forms take place on the ethereal level.

Genetic affinities

Darwinists explain not only similar bodily structures but also genetic similarities in terms of common descent. But again, such similarities show nothing definite about how the organisms originated, and could just as easily be attributed to some form of conscious design.
Darwinists use differences in proteins and DNA as a ‘molecular clock’ to estimate how long ago different species diverged from a common ancestor. Each gene or protein is a separate clock, which ‘ticks’ at a different rate. For instance, it is estimated that 600 million years are required to produce a 1% difference in the histones of two different organisms, compared with 20 million years for cytochrome C, 5.8 million years for haemoglobin, and only 1.1 million years in the case of the fibrinopeptides. However, the evolutionary trees based on different classes of proteins sometimes show considerable differences, and there are also major discrepancies between family trees based on comparative anatomy and those based on molecular biology.¹Evolution rates based on the fossil record, for example, are much higher than those predicted from genetics.² Different molecular clock studies indicate that the hypothetical common ancestor of all animals lived anywhere from about 2 billion to 274 million years ago (the latter date falls about 250 million years after the Cambrian explosion!).³
The meaning of overall DNA similarity between two organisms is a matter of debate. For instance, the genetic similarity of humans and chimpanzees has been put at 95%, 98.5%, and even 99.4%; yet humans possess selfconscious intelligence while apes do not. On the other hand, there are two species of fruit fly (Drosophila) that look alike but have only 25% of their DNA sequences in common. One study found that the snake and the crocodile (both reptiles) had only around 5% of their DNA sequences in common, whereas the crocodile and chicken had 17.5% of sequences in common – the opposite of what neo-Darwinism predicts. There are more than 3000 species of frog, all of which look superficially the same, but there is greater variation of DNA among them than between the bat and the blue whale.⁴ This is a further indication that far more than DNA is required to build an organism.

References

Taxonomy

1. Alec Panchen, Evolution, London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993, p. 59.
2. John D. Morris and Frank J. Sherwin, The Fossil Record: Unearthing nature’s history of life, Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research, 2010, p. 63.
3. Quoted in Alexander Mebane, Darwin’s Creation-Myth, Venice, FL: P&D Printing, 1994, p. 30.
4. Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, pp. 39, 45.
5. Quoted in Walter J. ReMine, The Biotic Message: Evolution versus message theory, Saint Paul, MN: St. Paul Science, 1993, p. 311.
6. Ibid., pp. 280, 409.

Homology, parallelism and convergence

1. Antony Latham, The Naked Emperor: Darwinism exposed, London: Janus Publishing Company, 2005, pp. 176-8.
2. B.P. Williams, I.G. Johnston, S. Covshoff and J.M. Hibberd, ‘Phenotypic landscape inference reveals multiple evolutionary paths to C₄ photosynthesis’, eLife, 2:e00961, 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3786385.
3. butterfliesofamerica.com.
4. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable humans in a lonely universe, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 128-9.
5. scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2012/07/12/meet-the-borhyaenoids-2012.
6. Life’s Solution, pp. 128, 20.
7. Simon Conway Morris, ‘We were meant to be ...’, New Scientist, 16 Nov. 2002, pp. 26-9.
8. Ananthaswamy Anil, ‘Evolution returns to same old genes again and again’, New Scientist, 23 Aug. 2003, p. 15.

Embryology

1. Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The hypothesis of formative causation, London: Icon Books, 3rd ed., 2009, p. 139.
2. www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/odyssey/clips; [www.geocities.com/a_and_e_uk/PerloffC10.htm].
3. See Human evolution: the ape-ancestry myth, section 6, http://davidpratt.info.

Genetic affinities

1. Morris and Sherwin, The Fossil Record, p. 158.
2. William R. Corliss (comp.), Biological Anomalies: Mammals II, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1996, pp. 182-8, 191-2.
3. Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design, New York: HarperOne, 2013, pp. 102-13.
4. ReMine, The Biotic Message, p. 449; Richard Milton, ‘Darwinism – the forbidden subject’, [www.alternativescience.com/darwinism.htm].

An article published by David Pratt. @  http://davidpratt.info/evod1.htm