My doubt that this really is the case is based on the concept of emergence. This principle states that matter undergoes phase transitions as it grows more complex, in somewhat the same way that water molecules undergo phase transitions to ice or steam depending on the temperature. Seen in this way, solid matter (the observable world) is a function of phase transitions that make massive collections of atoms solid, and is not simply a function of the perceiving mind. Perception is a function of the mind, of course, but the issue here is what actually is perceived.

As I’ve said, I don’t know if this thread is still active, but if anyone still reads it and has any comment on these points I would be quite interested to read them.

This video will not be motivated by any support for religious fundamentalism. Instead it will attempt to examine in an open and unbiased manner the scientific and philosophical controversies that are currently at work within the academic and scientific communities, many of them unknown to the general public

It will recognize from the outset that Darwinism is the only explanation of evolution that can currently be seen as being at all well developed — but also that an alternative and ‘view of what causes evolution has long been available in the works of J.W. von Goethe (1749–1832), a view recently given renewed emphasis in The Upright Ape, a New Origin of Species, by Dr. Aaron G. Filler (2007), but without addressing the underlying issue of scientific materialism — which will be addressed here. Because they are ‘exact opposites’ only one of these two theories can be true.
The following critical issues will be among those discussed with a view to opening these subjects to public awareness and wider debate:

1. the ‘semantics’: can Darwinism rid itself of the anthropomorphic and ‘intentional/purposive’ language without undercutting itself completely — oxymoronic phrases like ‘Designerless design’ that translates into ‘purposeless purpose’; language being used irrationally to make something appear plausible. Also the unjustified use of ‘militaristic’ and ‘aggressively competitive’ language (carnivores only 3% of animals; overriding importance of mutualism and symbiosis). The fact that ‘survival of the fittest’ is a meaningless tautology: how do we know they are fit? Because they survive!

2. the refusal of biology in particular to take on the implications of quantum theory – primacy of consciousness over ‘matter’; the ‘insubstantiality’ of matter.

3. the rapid current unraveling of the genetic basis of evolution: the gene ‘coding’ for a protein – and inferred DNA ‘coding’ for the whole organism – not only structure, but also all forms and behaviors (including the breakdown of the General Cell Theory and the assertion of exclusive genetic inheritance from parental organisms

4. related to 3. – the lack of evidence (i.e. unfounded assertion) that form and behavior is all and exclusively in the DNA.

5. Richard Lewontin’s quote about the “absolute commitment” to materialism – revealing the real agenda: preventing the “Divine foot in the door”. Philosophically, there is no epistemologically sound basis for this materialism — it remains a belief system based more on faith than on science. Goethe’s thought transcends it.

.6. the lack of confirmation of the theory from the fossil record — the fossil record is not a branching tree but a series of unconnected straight lines of varying length — that which S.J. Gould called ‘stasis’ or ‘punctuated equalibria’—requiring sudden and not gradual changes, but with no explanation of how that can occur excepting the continued anthropomorphic misuse of the word ‘selection’ (point 1)
.
7. the unexplained problem of the multitude of extraordinary symbiotic/ mutually dependent relationships: fig trees and wasps, for example

8. the lack of evidence to extrapolate from microevolution (adaptation) to macroevolution; an unsubstantiated assumption.

9. the problem of Form represents a severe challenge to Darwinism; other sources of origin and maintenance of form are required as gene theory crumbles in this respect.

10. origin of life: no evidence for assertion of chance origin: all lab attempts to create life have failed miserably; assertion of inorganic origin comes straight out of our commitment to materialism.

11. Darwin’s ‘explanation’ of animal ‘instinct’ (unbelievably complex behavior) in the Origin is now widely seen as an “argument from authority” having no explanatory value. The ‘origin’ of language is similarly unexplained.

12. It will be necessary to emphasize that evolution is itself a fact, but that Darwinism remains an unproven theory — a purely ‘mechanical’ explanation (point 1).

13 Darwinism states as fact that there is no direction (or purpose) to evolution (S.J.Gould’s “rewind the tape and nature would come up with something quite different”). But the evidence of a continuous increase of complexity goes against the theory. In a truly ‘purposeless’ material universe everything would be mineral, but it now looks as if the minerals themselves were the product of ‘life’. “Biochemical processes may thus be responsible for most of the earths 4.300 known mineral species.” (eight member international team studying the ‘non-competitive’ evolution of minerals’ — 2008 report)

14 or whatever: the persistence of gaps — the ‘missing links’ are almost all still missing, so should not the scientific response be that there’s something wrong with the theory; that something strange must have been happening in the gaps?

15. what does Goethe have to offer science and philosophy that Darwin does not? To begin with there will be no contradictory use of language (point 1) and it will tie in more effectively with our developing understanding of the role of DNA.

16. Darwinism is the product of a Cartesian mechanistic ‘clockwork’ concept of the universe, including life, all now viewed as simplistic. It was born within a 19th century consciousness dominated by the industrial revolution, and any other theory with so much leveled against it would have long ago been abandoned by science. Is Darwinism destined to become the most successful failure in the history of science, its success based upon a 19th century commitment to material causes, its failure based on the irrational misuse of language? (Note: ‘successful failure’ is here an appropriate oxymoron, like all the rest upon which Darwin’s theory is based, in its entirety.

Owen Barfield would have loved this poem by Robert Frost:

ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE

The Universe is but the Thing of things,
The things but balls all going round in rings.
Some of them mighty huge, some mighty tiny,
All of them radiant and mighty shiny.

They mean to tell us all was rolling blind
Till accidentally it hit on mind
In an albino monkey in a jungle,
And even then it had to grope and bungle,

Till Darwin came to earth upon a year
To show the evolution how to steer.
They mean to tell us, though, the Omnibus
Had no real purpose till it got to us.

Never believe it. At the very worst
It must have had the purpose from the first
To produce purpose as the fitter bred:
We were just purpose coming to a head.

Whose purpose was it? His or Hers or Its?
Let’s leave that to the scientific wits.
Grant me intention, purpose, and design-
That’s near enough for me to the Divine.

And yet for all this help of head and brain
How happily instinctive we remain,
Our best guide upward further to the light,
Passionate preference such as love at sight.

)
Comments are welcome

Again you are making up a religious argument where there isn’t one, and ascribing to others nefarious motivations they don’t have. Despite your statement on the “central dogma of genetics”, like many other professed theories in science, has undergone significant revision and change since it was first proposed by Crick. Even Crick admits that he had would have called it something else, if for no other reason than to stop hearing nonsense from other people about what they presume (though he didn’t state it) is its sacredness as a rule.

And your selective quoting of Commoner is noticeable; after all Commoner is arguing that humans shouldn’t mess with genetics because of “the harmonious relation between the two systems develops during their cohabitation, in the same species, over very long evolutionary periods, in which natural selection eliminates incompatible variants.” (emphasis mine) His argument is essentially that what we know of how genetics work does not give us sufficient competence to go messing with it; we simply do not understand the complex interactions at play in genetics simply knowing the genes of a given plant or animal.

By any reasonable measure, these results contradict the central dogma’s cardinal maxim: that a DNA gene exclusively governs the molecular processes that give rise to a particular inherited trait. The DNA gene clearly exerts an important influence on inheritance, but it is not unique in that respect and acts only in collaboration with a multitude of protein-based processes that prevent and repair incorrect sequences, transform the nascent protein into its folded, active form, and provide crucial added genetic information well beyond that originating in the gene itself. The net outcome is that no single DNA gene is the sole source of a given protein’s genetic information and therefore of the inherited trait.

I’m not quite sure how you could have read this article and then turned around and misused it to make an argument that evolution is bankrupt; hell, if anything Commoner is making even stronger arguments that inherited traits, and evolution itself, are vastly more complex than we’ve heretofore thought. He says as much:”There can be no doubt that the emergence of DNA was a crucial stage in the development of life, but we must avoid the mistake of reducing life to a master molecule in order to satisfy our emotional need for unambiguous simplicity.”

But none of this matters, because after reading your Tolstoy quote, you smugly believe me a dolt and a zealot. I don’t know what more ridiculous, your mis-characterization of others making an argument different from yours of being entranced with idolatry, or your obsession with outdated 19th century texts.

There are two possibilities where ‘evolution’ is concerned, (A) that it is the product of ‘Ideas’ or of what the Scholastic Realists used to call ‘universals’, or (B) it that it is the product of ‘chance’ and of the unconscious workings of natural law, and what is certain on a basis of simple logic is that the latter (B) should not be allowed to use language that is appropriate only to the former (A).

Daniel Dennet is bold enough to claim that Darwinism only uses intentional idioms (A) ‘as if’ they where true (knowing all the time that they are not). Implying that they do this because without them one cannot prove the truth of (B) (see his book ‘The Intentional Stance’). Whereas I am saying that with them one cannot prove the truth of (B) because one has lapsed into extreme irrationality.

You appear to be claiming the modern knowledge of genetics for some unknown reason overrides these two choices which according to you then leaves only (B) whereas I will state that if that were the case it would leave only (A) — the rational option.

To begin with, therefore it must be admitted that where science is concerned Darwinism is a nineteenth-century worldview, and that while twentieth century discoveries in the realm of DNA have seemed, on the surface at least, to support that world view, they are themselves gradually becoming suspect for their adherence to the “central dogma of genetics,” which is “the view that an organism’s genome — its total complement of DNA — should fully account for its characteristic assemblage of inherited traits.” This dogma was strongly argued against by the octogenarian scientist Barry Commoner, in the article “Unravelling the Myth of DNA”, published in Harper’s Magazine, February 2002. He writes:

“Why, then, has the central dogma continued to stand? To some degree the theory has been protected from criticism by a device more common to religion than science: dissent, or merely the discovery of a discordant fact, is a punishable offence, a heresy that might easily lead to professional ostracism. Much of this bias can be attributed to institutional inertia, a failure of rigor, but there are other, more insidious, reasons why molecular geneticists might be satisfied with the status quo; the central dogma has given them such a satisfying, seductively simplistic explanation of heredity that it seemed sacrilegious to entertain doubts. The central dogma was simply too good not to be true.”

So there you have it ‘The Great Tabu’ at work again, but this time not from Barfield, but from an accomplished geneticist.

Richard Shelldrake also brings to our attention that ‘codes’ do not read themselves, that they are
both written and read by ‘consciousness’ which is word the word code ‘means’. So again, where simple logic is concerned Darwinists want to (must); try to ‘have their cake and eat it too’. However, no one is going to wait with bated breath while you struggle to change your mind on this issue, because we all know that that is next to impossible for any Darwinian ‘true believer’ to do that. The reason for this was long ago stated by Leo Tolstoy:

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would require them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted to explain to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven thread by thread into the fabric of their lives.”

Sorry Sean, to set your mind straight on this you will probably have to wait until next time around (Barfield held to the truth of reincarnation) — but according to Darwin there is no next time around, so perhaps you’d better think it over some more while your playing golf.

Or you could chalk it up to sloppy writing and an attempt to use already known concepts to illustrate a new one, apparently not to your satisfaction. Which does not undermine in anyway the research behind it. Which, for all the talk of metaphors and Faustian bargains, no one here seems to be asserting some sort of new controversial take on genetics.

Your use of the dismissive term “dashboard knowledge” gets to the heart of it; unable, or unwilling, to take the effort to actually acquire knowledge of which you’ve already denigrated, you’ve declared victory on a field of your own choosing. Its as if I were to declare myself the winner of the US Open by proving how dumb playing golf is.

“The old tabu’s are gone, it is true. Thus, I should feel no embarrassment if the argument obliged me at this point to defend the position of atheism or even of aristocracy in politics, or to advance some new theory of love based on sexual perversion… But the old tabus have merely been replaced by new ones. Those I have just alluded to are dead or dying, whereas the one I shall be infringing is very much alive; and a wise man thinks twice before laying sacrilegious hands on the Lord’s anointed” SM

So I have revised my first paragraph to read:

The word ‘mechanism’ is used in Darwin’s theory as a synonym for biological complexity, where it has achieved the status of a lexical definition: i.e. “a doctrine that holds all natural processes to be capable of complete explanation by the laws of physics and chemistry.” This definition, however, conceals a contradiction in that the laws of physics and chemistry (natural law) to not entail any need for consciousness, whereas it is impossible for ‘mechanisms’ in the normal sense of this word, to exist without their being the product of consciousness.

If anyone is interested in a more thorough treatment of this subject, outside of Barfield’s own work, they may find it in my essay ‘Karl Popper and Owen Barfield’

http://www.doyletics.com/arj/popperob.htm

Nature in Darwin’s theory is supposedly Mindless, and man-made machines are the product of conscipous decision making, of human intelligence. To make them lexically ‘equal’, therefore, is to tell the world that there is no difference whatever between our doing a thing intentionally, and our doing it unintentionally. In one of his essays, Barfield makes it clear that if this were really the case then our legal system would also collapse in ruins, since it entirely based upon a distinction that we are now trying to say does not exist.

If you were in the dock say, charged with first degree murder, and you insisted that it had all been an accident (manslaughter) would you not be a little perturbed to find that this distinction was not allowed, that accident and intentional had identical meanings where the law was concerned?

Darwin’s theory is riddled through and through with intentional and volitional idioms (metaphors), and he even directly compares the conscious decision making of animal breeders with what unconscious ‘natural selection’ supposedly accomplishes, and this is called science?

You may also be aware that Owen was a strong supporter of Goethe’s view of evolution in which genuinely intentional ‘archetypal Ideas’ are the causal element in nature. In Prof. Alan P. Cotterell’s work Goethe’s View of Evil (1982) the following quote appears from Part 1 of Faust, in which the ‘prince of liars’ tells an earnest student how to use words to good effect:

Student: Yet in each word some concept must there be.

Mephistopheles: Quite true! But don’t torment yourself too anxiously;
For at the point where concepts fail,
At the right time a word is thrust in there.
With words we fitly can our foes assail,
With words a system we prepare,
Words we quite fitly can believe,
Nor from a word a mere iota thieve.

Cottrell then comments: “This is not only the undermining of thinking, it is its annihilation.”

It means that words are used just for their ‘effect’ on the mind, and with no regard to their real conceptual content or to rationality itself; whether one wishes to attribute this ruse to Mephisto or not is a matter of choice, but if one does it is certainly a devilishly clever one that has managed to fool at least six-generations of scientists.

Does this help?

Because if it is, I don’t see how it follows that natural selection is false, simply because natural (that is, intent-less) selection employs the word “selection” which implies intent. From what I know of evolutionary theory, the conditions of a creature’s existence exert survival pressures to which the creature must either adapt or perish. If it adapts and survives, nature has “selected” it from among its failed or less successful counterparts to pass its genes on to the most desirable mate (that is, those mates who have met and conquered similar survival pressures) thus ensuring that, over time, the genes best suited for survival in certain natural conditions will be “selected” for generational transferal. If it does not adapt and dies, then the creature’s genes were not “selected.”

If I’m not misreading Darwin, I don’t see how his quasi-metaphorical use of words like “selection” or “good engineering” implies that some intentional force is steering the ship of evolution. He means to say simply that particular instances of an organism’s survival will appear “selected” for particular conditions when treated generally. Why, then, should we think that Darwin’s use of metaphor implies anything other than the purely mechanistic meaning he seemed to have intended? Or have I misread your essay as well?

DARWIN REVISTITED: Further Exploring the Surprisingly Full Junkyards of Science

If Darwin were alive today, he might want to send to this fair, even-handed and honorable publication, a new version of his famous theory, one that employs the exact same logic as his first, but applied to a slightly different realm.

He might offer the world a theory of ’mechanical origins’ in which he claimed that all of the modern world’s vast array of man-made machinery, hugely complicated though it be, had come about entirely without deliberate intent — through the meaningless operation of chance and natural law — however, when he came to explain how all that remarkable machinery both functioned and developed, he would make copious use of the language of creativity, including technical terms of every description, and would talk loosely about nature’s ‘good engineering design’ and it having ‘invented’ this or that device, but he would justify all this by saying that such words are only being used as ‘metaphors’, and would ask us all to ignore the appearance of any logical contradiction — because after all, what does verbal logic have to do with science anyway?

His new theory would have only one serious drawback, which is that if it were true then every engineer and technician would be made immediately redundant — just as God was by his earlier theory — and we would all then stand around doing nothing mechanically creative, just waiting for all the useful ‘mechanisms’ that the modern world so highly values to materialize by themselves — and having materialized to then repair themselves — because if his new theory were true then all of mankind’s technical jobs will have been replaced by ‘words’ — words that appear to convey the presence of mechanical creativity in the universe, but only as a blind and unconscious facet of ‘natural law’ — A Blind Watchmaker? Yes indeed, a word that always carries with it a host of ‘mechanistic’ images, because we can see in our mind’s eye the intricate parts of a watch in motion. This helps us to conveniently forget that our craftsman (nature) is not only blind but supposedly also unconscious, and that ‘ideas’ are nowhere within his reach — although we everywhere use the language of creative ideas to help describe what we believe nature does. Because even in this supposedly blind unconscious state we still firmly insist as scientists that he (nature) manufactures very fine watches — would you buy a watch from this most dubious of all craftsman? If you did, surely it would give new meaning to the phrase ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’.

Yet it seems that since 1859 science has bought much more than a watch from him, it has bought an entire bill of ‘mechanistic’ goods dedicated to the notion that nature uses humanly creative metaphors disguised as natural law, to make organisms vastly more complicated than watches — to change rocks into plants and plants into animals, and then to have one species evolve out of another. All it seems achieved by one little word ‘selection,’ signifying a human mental activity the use of which in this context was irrational right from the outset, supplemented of course by all manner of technical terms — lower case intelligent design at its very best — because taken altogether they allow our blind unconscious watchmaker to appear to be slowly making a host of consciously creative ‘decisions, indeed billions upon billions of them, all going on while he is soundly asleep. And heaven forbid that he should ever wake up, because science would then be appalled and throw insults at him, like calling him an ‘intelligent designer’.

Such metaphors do indeed work, but only anthropomorphically in our own minds; they do nothing creative whatever in nature — let alone build organisms far more complex than anything man has ever made. The problem with the 1859 theory, however, is not that it cannot be disproved (I have just done so), but that the majority of intellectuals, academicians mostly, won’t allow it to be disproved no matter how convincing the arguments brought against it. So even if we were to take it from Darwin himself, as it were straight from the horse’s mouth, or from the mouth of an honest man revisiting his past and giving us the above honest reappraisal of his own mistaken logic, would it really change anything?

For the sake of science’s future it is to be hoped that it would, but so many reputations are here at stake that even if, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth, Darwin himself were to reappear and take a strong stand against his own theory, in the fully rational manner outlined above, it is doubtful that anyone would pay any attention to him. They might even call him names and want to ban him, or jail him to keep him quiet, so as not to seriously disturb the topsy turvy world that he once helped to create.

But how is it that his famous theory falls so quickly into ruins when its internal logic is carefully examined? Perhaps the English philologist the late Owen Barfield had the answer to this last question:

“Chance, in fact, equals no hypothesis and to resort to it in the name of science means that the impressive vocabulary of technological investigation (associated with evolutionary biology) is actually being used to denote its [science’s] breakdown; as though, because it is something that we can do with ourselves in water, drowning should be included as one of the ways of swimming.” Taken from Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry.

Yes, all undeniably true. But I ask you, has it ever been harder for science to throw away its accumulated 19th century junk? It still gives us the appearance of truth, which is why so many are anxious to ‘save’ It. But correcting it may well be that vital central key to the next important stage in human development.

Don Cruse,

Ponoka, AB

I hope that the time for this important thinker has come – bravo
to Front Porch Republic for publishing this article. Look forward
to the sequel.

Science properly understood so quickly becomes scientism. As Houston Smith put it in an article in Touchstone magazine (Summer 1997): “Science deserves no reproach, but scientism goes beyond the findings of science to assume that the scientific method is the only reliable (or at least most reliable) road to truth, and that the things science deals with are the most fundamental things that exist. In slipping into these assumptions, it turns into a religion … loyalty to their profession pressures scientists to exaggerate their abilities in the public eye, for this brings both prestige and funding. …Stripped of science’s prestige, which it battens on but has no right to, scientism has no leg to stand on. The astounding power of science to probe the workings of nature gives it zero credentials for pronouncing on the whole of things.” And so on.

In other words, scientism says that, in effect, “dashboard knowledge” is the only knowledge there really is. Yet science, as opposed to scientism, itself shows that the “fundamental things” cannot be understood apart from the participative consciousness. But consciousness belongs to a higher level of things than do the elementary things of physics and even of biology. The habit of scientists is to explain the greater in terms of the lesser. But even science itself now forces us to see that we cannot do this without error. We also need wisdom, and that means understanding the lesser in terms of the greater.

I don’t think its surprising that biologists and others don’t sit around wondering about the metaphysical implications of their work (though some inevitably do). Most of them tend to assume a variety of natural laws, not because its an unquestioning idolatry, but because they would be sitting around all day discussing metaphysics instead of gleaning new, potentially practical, information about their subjects. I’m sure theres plenty of geologists that have strong opinions one way or another on these very same subjects, but its not going to help them find new oil wells or mineral seams.

And the latter example is especially true in regards to your example of geologic formation. Sure, we could argue that none of that stuff ever occurred, or that primitive consciousness changed the earth’s environment. But those guys sure do seem to hit alot of the black stuff using patterns that they gleaned from a time they never witnessed themselves.

“It can do no harm to recall occasionally that the prehistoric evolution of the earth, as it was described in [popular accounts], was not merely never seen. It never occurred. Something no doubt occurred, and what is really being propounded by such popular writers, and, so far as I am aware, by the text-books on which they rely, is this. That at the time the unrepresented [that which exists but is not apprehended by human consciousness] was behaving in such a way that, IF human beings with the collective representations [Let's say, type of consciousness] characteristic of the last few centuries of western civilization had been there, the things described would also have been there.

“This is not quite the same thing. …the descriptions may… be valuable, not as actual descriptions, but as notional ‘models’. What is important is, to remember that that is all they are.”

I quote from Barfield’s Saving the Appearances. It becomes a pretty basic error to describe prehistoric scenarios that never actually existed because there was no human observer present.

“The record of the rocks IS a script containing stored memories of earth’s past. It is only a question of how the script is to be read.” What if, Sean, Barfield is right in arguing that consciousness has changed — not just people’s ideas about nature and self, but consciousness itself has changed? You can see that there must be implications for the phenomena to which the consciousness correlates.

A combox message or series of combox messages is not the place to try to epitomize Saving the Appearances, which you might want to look up. Perhaps take a look at some of Lanza’s new book Biocentrism to help loosen up a little first — stretching exercise. Barfield has a lot more to offer than Lanza.