Pop Quiz: Who Believes and Promotes the Fixity of Species Belief?

Historians will point to the eighteenth century Swedish super-scientist Carl von Linne, or Linnaeus, as a key figure in the history of thought who promoted the religious belief that once created, all species remain fixed throughout history.

That answer gets an F because not only did Linnaeus soften his views and no longer accept the fixity of species in his later years, but the question is not in the past tense. The question is in the present tense. Who believes, not believed, in the fixity of species.

Ah, that’s easy. Creationists, right? Wrong again. Go back and do your homework, or if you must, see the next line where the answer is given backwards:

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Yes, it is they who believe in the fixity of species. After all, modern evolutionary thought arose in the highly religious culture of seventeenth and eighteenth century western Europe. It was motivated by, and inherits religious ideas from that day. It is, in fact, stuck fast to its centuries-old metaphysical foundation. Far from the cutting-edge science it purports to be, evolution is little more than today’s ossified remains of long-since discarded religious ideas.

For example, as one of the major pillars of evidence for their theory evolutionists cite the adaptation of organisms that we observe in the laboratory and in the field. It is, according to evolutionists, a powerful proof text for evolution. There is a constant stream of evolutionists insisting that such evidence proves evolution to be a fact.

It is as if they are forever stuck in the nineteenth century, replaying Darwin’s marvel at how differing bird populations “undermine the stability of species.” Like Sisyphus forever pushing the rock up the hill, they are forever pushing the absurd idea that resistance to pesticides and antibiotics in plants and microbes, respectively, make evolution the only possibility because as Darwin believed, if God created the species they would be fixed.

As Ernst Mayr pointed out, the doctrine of fixity of species was a key barrier to overcome if the concept of evolution was to flourish:

Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species, for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution. The fixed, essentialistic species was the fortress to be stormed and destroyed; once this had been accomplished, evolutionary thinking rushed through the breach like a flood through a break in a dike.

And indeed evolutionary thinking eventually did rush in, on the power of metaphysical arguments such as this one. But these powerful religious motivations don’t just go away. Indeed, they provide the justification and motivation in the face of daunting scientific contradictions. And so to this day, evolutionists continually repeat their mantras from centuries past. Here is a typical example of how, today, the religion has become so ingrained in evolutionary thought. Below the video is the text beginning at the 9 second mark.

[0.09] What we study is how viruses and bacteria and other microbes get inside your body to infect them. And what I wanted to talk to you about today was how evolution is involved in that process, and basically why we think evolution is very important to understand.

So, when you get infected by a virus or a bacterium, there is basically a war going on inside your body, where the virus wants to multiply, or the bacteria wants to multiply, and your immune system wants to keep it back down. Now what happens is that, we as humans have evolved over millennia to actually have specific cells and those cells have particular receptors that will get rid of the virus or kill it or sequester it or some way make it so that it can’t infect you and make you sick.

Now the virus then, is evolving inside our bodies to get around that immune system. And if you look at the genes inside viruses, sometimes they steal long stretches of genes from their host, and other times they have mimics of genes in their host. So basically, viruses have this tremendous chance to evolve inside of people, that is their host, so they can get around an immune system.

So a successful virus would be something like influenza virus, that changes every year. So what it does is it mutates. It makes a lot of different forms of itself. Most of these are completely useless—that is they are defective viruses. But out of the millions and millions of viruses that it makes, one or a few of those will be better, and those will go on and multiply and infect other people.

That is evolution at work.

So basically, the viruses make millions of copies of themselves, most of them are worse. They’re making random mutations, random changes. They don’t know beforehand what’s good or what’s bad. The best ones will win out, and those will go on and infect.

In the same way, people have evolved, but over a much slower time scale. So that they made some changes in their immune system, to keep up with particular viruses and other changes that were actually worse. And the changes that were beneficial gradually win out.

So in a nutshell, that’s an example of evolution, at play, in your body, that goes on all the time.

And so I think we need to understand this, because bacteria in particular are able to mutate to get around antibiotics. It’s another example of evolution. We need to understand this, so that we can develop drugs that will actually get around bacteria’s incredible ability to evolve quickly, to get around the drugs we use today. Thank you.

For many this just proves that evolutionists are liars. Or that they are fools.

But when evolutionists such as Professor Bjorkman make these arguments, they are not consciously lying. Here Professor Bjorkman is smart, knowledgeable and honestly speaking her mind.

So how to explain evolutionists, such as Bjorkman, when they present their evolutionary absurdities with all the earnestness of a five-year-old talking about Santa Claus? It isn’t from ignorance or from deceit.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Research Sheds Light on How the Brain Responds to Stimulus and Learns

It’s no surprise that the brain is profoundly complex. We discussed here, here and here that the brain contains hundreds of billions of nerve cells which are connected via hundreds of trillions of synapses. That a single synapse is like a microprocessor (although far more complex of course), with both memory-storage and information-processing functions and thousands of molecular switches. That a single human brain has more switches than all the computers, routers and Internet connections in the world. That evolutionists now admit that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. That evolutionists insist it is a fact that the brain evolved, and yet fail miserably to explain how such an incredible event occurred, or even how we could know it to be a fact. It just is, because, ultimately, it boils down to metaphysical claims about what must be true, scientific evidence be damned.

But all of this is, as usual, only one small sliver the evolution’s absurdities. For if the brain itself is complex, consider what it does. For instance, the brain is a fantastic learning machine. As a baby explores its environment it learns, and in this process a massive array of molecular switches and controls are adjusted within the brain.

One research study, for instance, found 12,000 segments of DNA (which as usual evolutionists had thought were mere oddities) that are transcribed in response to environmental stimuli. This is the first step in the brain’s process of responding, adjusting and learning. These DNA segments, known as enhancers, influence gene expression which in turn influences how the brain’s neurons function and communicate with each other.

Presumably learning processes such as this lead to knowledge. But does knowledge lead to wisdom?

Global Warming Quandary Resolved

In light of last week's release of more emails revealing ulterior motives of climate researchers, we felt a reprint of our reporting of an overlooked breakthrough resolution to the entire quandary was in order. --Ed.

New research out this week has resolved a long-standing, and important, quandary about the causes of global warming. While several models point to anthropogenic CO2 and other greenhouse gases as the leading cause of global warming, the warming trends do not quite match the history of anthropogenic CO2. In fact, shrinking glaciers and other undeniable evidences of warming trace back to about the mid seventeenth century. But this predates the significant rise in anthropogenic CO2 that came in later centuries. Now environmental researchers have solved the puzzle. While CO2 is undoubtedly an important factor in certain warming events, by far the most significant cause is the hot air emitted by evolutionists. In other words, anthropogenic theory rather than anthropogenic industry is the root cause of global warming.

What is particularly convincing about the new research is how precisely the earth's temperature correlates with major discharges of evolutionary hot air. As the figure illustrates, temperature spikes over the past three and a half centuries align perfectly with the history of thought. The correlation is simply too uncannny to doubt. Only the "flat-earth" warming deniers will find a way to explain this away.



In fact just today Canadian researchers recorded a significant warming event, which they were able to localize to a region over central Canada and the northern midwest of the USA. The timing (and location) correlate perfectly with a blog published by evolutionist PZ Myers entitled "The Ubiquity of Exaptation" where Myers pollutes science with a particularly acute hot gaseous emission. In fact one of the researchers, using a new experimental localization algorithm, believes he has traced the emission to a city block where, as it turns out, Myers resides. The researcher believes Myers wrote the blog from his home office.

In that blog Myers made several asanine statements about the evolution myth. In particular Myers emitted seemingly hilarious, but in fact environmentally dangerous, statements about the evolution of the nervous system. These included:

We use variations in these voltages to send electrical signals down the length of our nerves, but they initially evolved as a mechanism to cope with maintaining our salt balance.

I concluded this section by trying to reassure everyone that their brain is something more than just a collection of paramecia swimming about. Although the general properties of the membrane are the same, evolution has also refined and expanded the capabilities of the neuronal membrane: there are many different kinds of ion channels, which we can see by their homology to one another are also products of evolution, and each one is specialized in unique ways to add flexibility to the behavioral repertoire of the cell. The origins of the electrical properties are a byproduct of salt homeostasis, but once that little bit of function is available, selection can amplify and hone the response of the system to get some remarkably sophisticated results.

Once again, the cell simply reuses machinery that evolved for other purposes to carry out these functions.

The Trichoplax genome has been sequenced, and found to contain a surprising number of the proteins used in synaptic signaling…but it doesn't have a brain or any kind of nervous system, and none of its four cell types are neurons. What a mindless slug like Trichoplax uses these proteins for is secretion: it makes digestive enzymes, not neurotransmitters, and sprays them out onto the substrate to dissolve its food. Again, in more derived organisms with nervous systems, they have simply coopted this machinery to use in signaling between neurons.

We also contain a great many possible signals: long- and short-range cues, signals that attract or repel, and also signals that can change gene expression inside the neuron and change its behavior in even more complicated ways. It's still at its core an elaboration of behaviors found in protists and even bacteria; we are looking at amazingly powerful emergent behaviors that arise from simple mechanisms.

You can see how extreme was this incident of evolutionary story telling. But what we once thought were merely hilarious and asanine mythological narratives are now clearly very, very dangerous environmental toxins. The bad news is that evolutionary theory far exceeds anthropogenic CO2 as the leading cause of global warming. The good news is that we now understand the cause.

New Finding: Perhaps Food Comes With Its Own Instructions

New research from the PRC is lending credence to those nutty health-food advocates who have suspected all along that food is more than your daily intake of carbon-carbon bonds and vitamins and minerals, that oats are better than Cheerios, and that the food chain is far more complex than evolution would have it.

Background

Because evolution was supposed to use mutations in the DNA’s genes, evolutionists focused heavily on the genes. Wasn’t the remaining 98% of the genome pretty much junk anyway? But much to the evolutionist’s surprise DNA is far more complex. As one writer put it:

Few predicted, for example, that sequencing the genome would undermine the primacy of genes by unveiling whole new classes of elements. … Biology's new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called 'junk' DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling.

As one evolutionist admitted:

We fooled ourselves into thinking the genome was going to be a transparent blueprint, but it's not.

And another echoed this sentiment:

The more we know, the more we realize there is to know.

An important function of non-coding DNA is regulation. The coding DNA contains the information to construct proteins and the non-coding DNA helps to regulate that construction. For instance, short snippets of transcribed DNA called microRNA (miRNA), about twenty nucleotides long, can halt the protein construction process. These recently discovered regulators are one example of the immense complexity of biology at the molecular level. But there’s more.

New research suggests new role for microRNA

PRC researchers have now shown that our genes are not only regulated by our microRNA, they are also regulated by the microRNA in the food we eat. In other words, food not only contains carbohydrates, proteins, fat, minerals, vitamins and so forth, it also contains information—in the form of these regulatory snippets of miRNA—which regulate our gene production.

There is much to learn, but this could be a hint of a much more complex, cross-species web of information in the biological world. Here’s how one writer summarized the findings:

The finding is obviously very thought-provoking; for instance, it would indicate that in addition to eating "materials" (in the form of carbohydrates, proteins, etc), you are also eating "information" (as different miRNAs from distinct food sources could well bear different consequences on the regulation of host physiology once taken by the host due to potential regulation of different target genes as determined by the "information" contained within the miRNA sequence), thus providing a whole new dimension to "You are what you eat." Furthermore, the potential significances of this finding would be:

1. has significantly expanded the functions of miRNAs;

2. is an extremely intriguing and novel idea that has far-ranging implications for human health and metabolism;

3. shed new light on our understanding of cross-domain (such as animal-plant) interactions, or perhaps even the 'co-evolution', and to open new ways of thinking about regulation of miRNAs, and about the potential roles of exogenous miRNAs such as those from food, plants and insects in prey-predator interactions;

4. provides evidence that plant miRNAs may be the seventh "nutrient" in the food (the six others are: H2O, protein, FFA, carbohydrate, vitamins and real elements);

5. provides a novel mechanism of development of metabolic disorder.

6. provides evidence that plant miRNAs may represent essential functional molecules in Chinese traditional herb medicine,

It is curious that evolution, which evolutionists insist is a fact, is so often surprised by the evidence.

David Coppedge is Guilty (Again)

Must we sift through the entire sordid affair of David Coppedge yet again? Although we have repeatedly and conclusively proved Coppedge’s guilt (which everyone already knew anyway), some dim-witted judge has now decided that the case has the merit to move forward. Recall that we provided iron-clad proof (and yes, our sources are very reliable) that while in college Mr. Coppedge, then in his Sophomore year, once argued late into the night with his roommate and one other student (from down the hall) about various political issues. Furthermore we proved that Mr. Coppedge was seen entering a bookstore on campus. Our source, who was naturally curious, ascertained that Coppedge browsed several controversial books in the Philosophy section of that bookstore.

Since that time we have learned more, much more. For instance, we now have records indicating that Coppedge has been checking out books from his local public library. One of them was about science.

We had hoped to have an out-of-court settlement that could keep this from getting ugly. We approached a certain individual—a go-between—with our damning evidence. His response, predictably, was that our evidence was too spotty. He missed, most likely on purpose, the entire point. And that point is that our evidence, regardless of how “spotty,” reveals an unmistakable pattern.

And that’s what this is about. Patterns and behaviors. And ulterior motives. Coppedge has demonstrated a clear and obvious pattern, year in and year out, of thinking. Not only that, but he questions things. Of course he was fired and blackballed—that’s what we do with people who think.

We once again stand in full support of the actions of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory which acted in great wisdom in this matter.

Evolutionists Aren’t the Only Ones: More Climate Emails

Scientists, as Del Ratzsch has pointed out, are people. And qua people, they sometimes have non scientific biases. These biases and motivations are crucial for they guide and restrict the science. Some answers are acceptable and other answers are not acceptable. It is that simple. There are those who are blackballed, and there are those who do the blackballing. It all depends on whether one is interested in truth or in dogma. You know who you are.

And what are these biases and motivations? It’s really quite simple. All you need to do is listen as this week’s new round of emails from climate-change scientists demonstrates yet again.

Once again we see deception, manipulation, misrepresentation and the like, but this time it is from climate researchers. Evolutionists are not the only ones who use and abuse science as a vehicle to advance and enforce their non scientific views.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Eric Alm: It’s A Plausible Idea

plau•si•ble  /’plôzəbəl/
1. (of an argument or statement) Seeming reasonable or probable.
2. (of a person) Skilled at producing persuasive arguments, esp. ones intended to deceive.

When one thinks of MIT one thinks of engineering and hard sciences. No nonsense academia that doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But now MIT Professor Eric Alm tells us that the spontaneous generation of a super progenitor is “plausible.” That’s an interesting choice of words because, in fact, that is precisely what evolution is not and it is difficult to imagine how Alm could have arrived at such a strange conclusion.

As we have discussed before, whereas Darwin absurdly hoped that cells could develop in a warm little pond somewhere, science had other things to say. Not only is the spontaneous generation of cellular life not plausible, so is the subsequent evolution of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).

Contra evolution, what science has been indicating for decades is that any such evolutionary LUCA would have had to have been a super progenitor. If evolution is true, then this ancient progenitor of all life must have been extremely complex. As one evolutionist admitted:

We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was.

That wins the understatement of the year award. Here is how one article describes the origin of the LUCA:

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism.

It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants (see timeline). It's hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.

Unfortunately science will always be vulnerable to such pseudo science. This is because science deals not only with what we do understand, but with what we do not understand as well. Science is constantly exploring and adding to our knowledge, but such explorations take it beyond the realm of the known, and into the realm of the unknown. This will always make it vulnerable to the charlatan.

And so it with sadness that we report that such academic chicanery has infected the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The evolution of the LUCA is, of course, not plausible. Not by any stretch of the imagination, and scientists are well aware of this.

We need not get philosophical about the concept of plausibility. We all know what it means. A hypothesis is plausible if it is reasonable or probable. A LUCA may have evolved, or a LUCA may not have evolved. But such an event is certainly not plausible according to our current scientific knowledge. We can argue about what happened long ago, but the state of our knowledge and its implications for the evolutionary narrative are quite clear. Which brings us to the second definition of “plausible” that unfortunately is also relevent to evolution.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Mark Pallen is Half Right (And All Wrong)

Evolutionist Mark Pallen asks “Is it possible to be a rationalist (a believer in the laws of logic) but not believe in evolution?” Pallen’s answers is “no,” which seems almost correct. Evolution arose from religious rationalism and today dominates rationalist thought. Can you find a rationalist who does not believe in evolution?

Unfortunately the Professor’s thinking is all downhill from there. In fact the parenthetical—where Pallen equates rationalists with believers in the laws of logic—is a dead give away of problems to come. It is true that rationalism draws heavily on logic, but this is hardly a distinctive of rationalism.

While it is good to see evolutionists acknowledge the inherent rationalism within their thinking, they also need to understand what this really means. Pallen later ridicules philosophers in what is all too common in the literature. Evolutionists present their sophomoric reasonings and then take a swipe at those from whom they should be seeking counsel.

Rationalism, empiricism and the Kalman filter

Rationalism is a style of reasoning that emphasizes axioms and preconceptions whereas empiricism focuses on observations. A good analogy is the Kalman filter which combines both a preconceived formula and measured data. Imagine a radar that tracks an aircraft flying overhead. The radar observations are used along with equations of how aircraft fly in the Kalman filter.

And the filter has a knob that controls its behavior. You can tell the filter to follow the data closely and ignore the equations of flight. This is like extreme empiricism. On the other hand you can tell the filter to follow the equations of flight closely and ignore the data. This setting—affectionately known as the “Oblivious Filter”—is like extreme rationalism.

Most scientists operate somewhere in between in the Happy Medium zone where theory and evidence are combined using common sense. Evolutionary thought, on the other hand, is in the Oblivious Filter zone. It doesn’t matter how many predictions are contradicted, evolution must be a fact. Evidence does not affect the fact of evolution.

The mother of all false dichotomies

And so Professor Pallen, like all evolutionists, believes there is only one way to deny the fact of evolution. The only escape is through Berkeley’s eighteenth century trap door that leads into the matrix. All of reality is just inside our heads, or maybe inside some computer somewhere in another reality.

Pallen walks his patient readers through such bizarre notions as though they are the only alternatives to evolution. In the mother of all false dichotomies, either evolution is true or everything must be a dream.

But this is standard evolutionary reasoning. A professor once explained to me that it’s either evolution or else there must be a grand cosmic conspiracy of deception. So this is the evolutionist’s absurd dichotomy: either the world just happened to arise all by itself or the world is a fiction.

Evolution is the result of religious rationalism and it is truly astonishing to see where it leads. Religion drives science and it matters.

Let’s Talk About Evolution: How Religious Insanity Has Corrupted Science

Think the evolutionary non scientific bluster is limited to a few outspoken blowhards? For those not familiar with the world of evolution and its deep infection of the life sciences, here is an educational video that appears to be the evolutionist’s version of whack-a-mole.

If there was any question of what this video is about it is answered within the first fifteen seconds with multiple pop-ups of evolution’s staple equivocation:

Evolution is a change in population over time [0.12]

Emily Willingham, Ph.D.

Science writer

Evolution is change in gene frequency [0.14]

Marta Wayne

Professor of Biology, University of Florida

This equivocation comes in many forms, such as the ruse that observed changes constitute evolution:

Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is actually an observable phenomenon that is supported by a significant body of evidence. [0.54]

Jeanne Garbarino

Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism

The Rockefeller University

Then there is the evolution-is-true lie. Do lies count as fallacies? In any case, maybe evolution is true, maybe it isn’t, but what we do know with absolute certainty is that we don’t know. I can’t tell you what the truth is about whether or how evolution occurred. But I can tell you the truth about the current state of our knowledge. Evolutionists say evolution is a fact, but the fact is evolution is not a fact. But evolutionists are certain, and therein lies the problem:

It’s the true story of where we came from [4:40]

Sheril Kirshenbaum

Research Associate

Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy

University of Texas-Austin

And of course no compendium of evolutionary’s fallacies would be complete without Theodosius Dobzhansky’s classic summary of evolution’s metaphysics:

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. [4.20]

Jenny Ruth Morber, Ph.D.

Former nanoscience researcher, current freelance science writer

Well we could go on and on, but what’s the point? The evolution lie, with its many distortions, misrepresentations and fallacies has thoroughly corrupted the life sciences. Religion drives science, and it matters.