Signature in the Cell and Intelligent Design, by Fred Reed - The Unz Review

A question that never ceases to fascinate is that of how life originated, and how and why it has progressed as it seems to have. The official story and de rigueur explanation is that that life came about through spontaneous generation from seawater. Believing this is the mark of an Advanced Person, whether one has the slightest knowledge of the matter. In academia researchers have been fired and careers ruined for questioning it. If you doubt that scientists can be ideological herd animals, as petty, intolerant, vindictive, and backstabbing as professors, read Heretic, by the PhD biotechnologist and biochemist Matti Leisola, who fell on the wrong side of the herd. Ths establishment’s continuing effort to stamp out heresy looks increasingly like a protracted desperatoon.

The other, more intuitive view of life is that of Intelligent Design. When one sees an immensely complicated system all of whose parts work together with effect and apparent purpose, such as an automobile or a cell, it is natural to think that someone or something designed it. There is much evidence for this, certainly enough to intrigue those of open mind and intelligence. Those of a philosophic bent may note that Freud, Marx, and Darwin are equally relics of Nineteenth Century determinism, and that Darwin wrote when almost nothing was known about much of biology. Note also that the sciences are tightly constrained and limited by their premises, unable to think outside of their chosen box. Others, wiser, wonder whether there are not more thing in heaven and earth.

The theory of ID is seen by the official story as a form of biblical Creationism of the sort holding that the world was created in 4004 BC. This is either wantonly stupid or deliberately dishonest. There is of course no necessary connection between ID and Buddhism, Islam, or the Cargo Cult. There are scientists who are not proponents of ID but simply see that much of official Darwinism does not make sense or comport with the evidence. Some IDers are Christians, which does not affect the validity, or lack of it, orf what they say. To judge by my mail, many people have serious doubts about the official explanation without being zealots of anything in particulr.

(For what it is worth, I am myself a complete agnostic. Faith and atheism both seem to me categorical beliefs in something one doesn’t know. ID certainly provides no support for the existence of a loving Sunday School god, given that in almost all places and all times most people have lived in misery and died in agony.)

To me, though, things look designed. By what, I don’t know.

Two difficulties affect the presentation of ID to the public. First, most of us have been subjected to thousands of hours of vapid “science” programs and mass-market textbooks. These tell us that doubters must be snake-handling forest Christian with three teeth. The second is that following the argument requires more technical grasp than most have. Trying to explain the question to a network-news audience is hopeless and makes those attempting it seem foolish.

Yet discussion has to be fairly technical to avoid degenerating into vague generalities. Following many of the authors requires familiarity with, or the ability to pick up quickly, such things as the nature of information, both in the Shannon sense of a reduction in uncertainty and of specified information as found in DNA and computer code. Some experience of programming helps as does a minor familiarity with organic chemistry and a nodding aquaintance with early paleontology.

And, alas, much of dispute turns on the mechanics of cell biology: DNA’s structure, codons and anticodons, polymerases and transcriptases, the functions of ribosomes, chirality of alpha amino acids, microRNA, protein folding, ORFans, developmental gene regulatory networks, Ediacaran and Cambrian paleontology (so much for 4004 BC BC), and similar technoglop, It isn’t rocket science, but it takes a bit of study to pick up. Most of us have other things to do.

The less one knows about cellular biology the easier it is to believe in spontaneous generation. Darwin knew nothing. Since then knowledge of biochemistry and molecular biology has grown phenomenally. Yet, despite a great deal of effort, the case for the accidental appearance of life has remained one of fervent insistence untainted by either evidence ofrtheoretical plausibility.

What are some of the problems with official Darwinism? First, the spontaneous generation of life has not been replicated. (Granted, repeating a process thought to have taken billions of years might lack appeal as a doctoral project.) Nor has anyone assembled in the laboratory a chemical structure able to metabolize, reproduce, and thus to evolve. It has not been shown to be mathematically possible.

This is true despite endless theories about life arising in tidal pools, on moist clays, in geothermal vents, in shallows, in depths, or that life arrived on carbonaceous chondrites–i.e., meteors. It has even been suggested that life arrived from Mars, which is to say life came from a place where, as far was can be determined, there has never been any. Protracted desperation.

Sooner or later, a hypothesis must be either confirmed or abandoned. Which? When? Doesn’t science require evidence, reproducibility, demonstrated theoretical possibility? These do not exist. Does not the ferocious reaction to doubters of the official story suggest deep-seated doubt even among the believers?

Other serious problems with the official story: Missing intermediate fossils–”missing links”– stubbornly remain missing. “Punctuated equilibrium,” a theory of sudden rapid evolution invented to explain the lack of fossil evidence, seems unable to generate genetic information fast enough. Many proteins bear no resemblance to any others and therefore cannot have evolved from them. On and on.

Finally, the more complex an event, the less likely it is to occur by chance. Over the years, cellular mechanisms have been found to be ever more complex. Darwin thought that in a warm pond, bits of goo clumped together, a membrane formed, and life was off and running. Immediately after Watson and Crick in 1953, the chemical mechanics of cellular function still seemed comparatively simple, though nobody could say where the genetic information came from. Today thousands of proteins are known to take part in elaborate processes in which different parts of proteins are synthesized under control of different genes and then spliced and edited elaborately. Recently with the discovery of epigenetics, complexity has taken a great leap upward. (For anyone wanting to subject himself to such things, there is The Epigenetics Revolution. It is not light reading.)

Worth noting is that that the mantra of evolutionists, that “in millions and millions and billions of years something must have evolved”–does not necessarily hold water. We have all heard of Sir James Jeans assertion that a monkey, typing randomly, would eventually produce all the books in the British Museum. (Actually he would not produce a single chapter in the accepted age of the universe, but never mind.) A strong case can be made that spontaneous generation is similarly of mathematically vanishing probability. If evolutionists could prove the contrary, they would immensely strengthen their case. They haven’t.

Improbabilities are multiplicative. The currents of exponentiation seem to be running ever more heavily against the monkey. If this is not true, evolutionists have not shown it not to be true.

Herewith a few recommendations for those who may be interested. Whatever one might conclude after reading the various authors on ID, you will quickly see that they are not “pseudoscientists,” not lightweights, and have serious technical credentials. They try to explain their subjects as they go along. Some succeed better than others.

The most accessible are Darwin’s Black Box, which I highly recommend, and The Edge of Evolution, both by Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. He puts the heavy-duty tech in the end notes. The intelligent reader will have no problem with these.

Also clearly written and carefully explained, are Signature in the Cell (mentioned aabove) and Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer (geophysicist, PhD in history and philosophy of science, Cambridge University.) The (again) intelligent reader will find these good but challenging. A third possibility in Undeniable, by Douglas Axe (Underrgad biochemistry, Berkeley, PhD. CalTech, chemical engineering) While very sharp, he uawa analogy so much to keep things simple that the science can be lost. Ann Gauger, Science and Human Origins, has a degree in biology from MIT, a PhD in developmental and molecular biology from the university of Washington, and has done postdoc work at Harvard (on the drosophila kinesin light chain, which I don’t know what is.)

Anyway, Meyer takes the reader clearly and comprehensively through the question of the origin of life from, briefly, ancient times through the research of Watson and Crick and then into the depths of the cell in detail. Of particular interest is his discussion of the the probabilistic barriers to spontaneous generation. Right or wrong, it is, again, assuredly not “pseudoscience,” and is extensively documented with references.

Should you order any of these books, ask Amazon to ship them in boxes labeled Kinky Sex Books or Applied Brestiality so nobody will know that you are reading ID.

Here, allow me a thought that the writers above do not mention: Maybe nature is more mysterious than even the ID people think: The insane complesity of life might suggest a far deeper level of non-understanding than even the ID folk suspect.

Suppose that you saw an actual monkey pecking at a keyboard and, on examining his output, saw that he was typing, page after page, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with no errors.

You would suspect fraud, for instance that the typewriter was really a computer programmed with Tom. But no, on inspection you find that it is a genuine typewriter. Well then, you think, the monkey must be a robot, with Tom in RAM. But this too turns out to be wrong: The monkey in fact is one. After exhaustive examination, you are forced to conclude that Bonzo really is typing at random.

Yet he is producing Tom Sawyer. This being impossible, you would have to conclude that something was going on that you did not understand.

Much of biology is similar. For a zygote, barely visible, to turn into a baby is astronomically improbable, a suicidal assault on Murphy’s Law. Reading embryology makes this apparent. (Texts are prohibitively expensive, but Life Unfolding serves.) Yet every step in the process is in accord with chemical principles.

This doesn’t make sense. Not, anyway, unless one concludes that something deeper is going on that we do not understand. This brings to mind several adages that might serve to ameliorate our considerable arrogance. As Haldane said, “The world is not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think.” Or Fred’s principle, “The smartest of a large number of hamsters is still a hamster.”

We may be too full of ourselves.

(Republished from Fred on Everything by permission of author or representative)

https://www.unz.com/freed/signature-in-the-cell-and-intelligent-design/

Roll Over, Thucydides—“Failure Migration” Means The Weak Do What They Can, The Strong Suffer What They Must, by James Kirkpatrick - The Unz Review

The victory of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) in the recent Mexican presidential election likely means an increase in immigration to the United States. AMLO has called immigration a “human right that we will defend” and will probably continue the Mexican government’s meddling in American affairs. AMLO has also reportedly promised to demand “respect” from President Trump and the United States, which probably means less cooperation in stopping Central American migrants from moving through the country. [Mexican populist Lopez Obrador triumphs in presidential race, by Sabrina Rodriguez, Politico, July 1, 2018] If Mexico continues its decline into lawlessness or goes into recession, immigration from Mexico itself will sharply increase.

The ironic result of all this: the worse Mexico performs, the more powerful that nation becomes. Many nominal American citizens believe their first loyalty is with Mexico. Though they don’t want to live there, they don’t want to surrender their identity. [Not a country, not even a team, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, June 26, 2018] Exporting its underclass to the U.S. spares Mexico and other Latin American countries the need for internal reform. As Tucker Carlson recently put it: “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class”. [Mexican presidential candidate calls mass migration to US a “human right,” by Dominic Mancini, Daily Caller, June 22, 2018]

Furthermore, Mexico and other Latin American countries continue to benefit from the endless flow of remittances from the U.S. America is literally paying welfare benefits to illegal aliens (if only for their anchor babies), some portion of which they then proceed to send home [Cutting welfare to illegal aliens would pay for Trump’s wall, by Paul Sperry, New York Post, March 10, 2018].

This phenomenon should be termed “Failure Migration.” The lower a people’s level of civilizational accomplishment, the more that people is able to expand its influence.

This paradox is another example of how the modern social and political system has a destructive and even dysgenic effect. Just as the welfare state is leading to dysgenictrends among the national population (satirized in the 2006 film Idiocracy) and global charitable efforts are leading to an unsustainable African population boom, so do progressive immigration policies and “asylum” claims allow dysfunction to spread.

One clear example: Central America. Recent days presented the unedifying spectacle of Vice President Mike Pence traveling to the region to beg its governments to stop exporting its people. “This exodus must end,” he whined to the leaders of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador .[VP Pence tells Central America that the ‘exodus must end’ by Sonny Figueroa, Washington Post, June 29, 2018]

Yet why should these leaders listen to him? According to the World Bank, remittances constitute 11.2 percent of Guatemala’s GDP, 20.4 percent of El Salvador’s, and 18 percent of Honduras’s. Central American leaders would have to be as self-hating and suicidal as America’s to stop the migration.

Despite America’s far greater power, it is Pence who is begging Central America for help, not imposing conditions. It is as though Thucydides has been repudiated—the weak do what they can, and the strong suffer what they must (lest anti-American journalists call them racist).

The migration is especially remarkable because these “asylum seekers” are not fleeing a war so much as simply fleeing other Central Americans, including their propensity to organized crime and violence against women [Border Report: Why Central American Asylum-Seekers Keep Making Their Way to America’s Doorstep, by Maya Srikrishnan, Voice of San Diego, July 2, 2018]. If “fleeing violence” qualifies one for “asylum,” every Latin American in the world qualifies for entry into the United States. Needless to say, the only real result is the violence then spreads to the United States, which is why MS-13 is now merrily beating people to deathonly miles away from the American capital.

Nor is the Failure Migration problem merely confronting the U.S. Venezuela, whose experiment in socialism was gleefully praised by Michael Moore in America and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, has now descended into an utter nightmare [Jeremy Corbyn’s silence on Venezuela speaks volumes, by Jason Mitchell, The Spectator, September 30, 2017]. The result: a massive outflow of Venezuelan refugees on the scale of those who fled the Syrian Civil War [Implosion of Venezuela creates refugees wave on scale of Syrian civil war, by Federico Puglie, Washington Times, April 12, 2018]. Countries such as Colombia, which have only recently recovered from their own internal chaos created by far-Left movements, are dealing with an increase in crime and instability caused by the unwanted influx of Venezuelans [The Crisis Next Door, by Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, March 2, 2018]. Needless to say, the United Nations is “supporting the relocation” of Venezuelans to neighboring countries like Brazil [UN Migration Agency Supports Latest Relocation of Venezuelans in Brazil, International Organization for Migration, May 4, 2018].

Yet this isn’t going unopposed by Brazilians; leading candidate for the presidency Jair Bolsonaro described the situation as “[T]he scum of the world is arriving in Brazil, as if we didn’t have enough problems to resolve” [Conservative’s star rises in Brazil as polarizing views tap into discontent, by Simon Romero, New York Times, May 7, 2016].

Many of these Venezuelans are probably just normal people escaping however they can. Yet Bolsonaro’s essential point is correct—it is impossible for any country to solve its longstanding problems if it is morally obligated to absorb the costs of every other country’s failures.

This is especially true when many of the failures of those nations are inherent to the people themselves. While policy choices matter, there’s no universe where Haiti is going to outperform Hong Kong, or Niger will outperform Norway. The only way international “equality” can be reached is if unlimited mass immigration reduces every country to the lowest common denominator—which may be the whole reason why globalists support it so much.

The effects of Failure Migration also distort the domestic politics of successful societies. Puerto Rico has been a festering sore on the U.S. for decades now, and cutting it loose is long overdue. Yet because Puerto Ricans have been given American citizenship, to some degree the damage is already done because so many have moved to the American mainland. While possessing American citizenship, they retain their Puerto Rican national consciousness, resentments against the Historic American nation, and Leftist voting habits.

Thus, NY-14 primary victor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can brag about how her Puerto Rican-born mother “scrubbed toilets” so she could be in America. She criticized the (white, male) incumbent for not speaking Spanish in a constituency that is now almost entirely post-American, less than 20 percent white [“Demographics” Did Help Ocasio-Cortez Win, and That’s a Good Thing, by Christina Cauterucci, Slate, July 1, 2018]. Now, because Americans made the mistake of subsidizing Puerto Rico over the last century and awarding them citizenship, they will be punished by having to deal with Ocasio-Cortez’ anti-white racial socialism, increasingly the dominant ideology of the post-Obama Democratic Party [Obama’s racial socialism, by Gregory Hood, Counter Currents, July 30, 2014]. If Puerto Rico had been cut away, Americans might not have to deal with this woman (or, for that matter, many of her constituents).

Civilization depends upon boundaries, just as markets depend on property rights. A people or nation can only build a good life and a secure future by ensuring its fate is not captive to the failures of others.

On paper, America is the strongest nation-state that has ever existed, yet our future is held hostage to every resentful wretch found around the globe. Even President Trump is begging Mexico’s new president to help us secure our own border [Trump predicts border help from Mexico’s president elect after call, by Steven Nelson, Washington Examiner, July 2, 2018].

In the end, the only thing that can stop the endless tide of failure and degeneracy is what Pat Buchanan called “force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.” America’s future, and the future of every civilized nation around the world, depends on possessing the will to put one’s own people first.

President Trump already has the tools he needs to secure the future of this country in terms of his Supreme Court-sanctioned legal powers, the possibility of taxing remittances, and using the military to build a wall.

He must not keep getting on his knees to the leaders of failed countries who have no reason to help him—or America.

James Kirkpatrick [Email him] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc.

http://www.unz.com/article/roll-over-thucydides-failure-migration-means-the-weak-do-what-they-can-the-strong-suffer-what-they-must/

Revisiting Charlottesville - By Jack Kerwick

On its first anniversary, it is worth revisiting what we may now refer to simply as “Charlottesville.”

Thanks to the assistance of Republican politicians and their apologists in Big Conservative media, the left didn’t hesitate to transform this event into an ideologically and politically-useful weapon.

Of course, Charlottesville could serve the left’s agenda only if the official interpretation of circumstances defies reality—as it does.

On August 12, 2017, hundreds of people gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia for what they called a “Unite the Right” rally.

They would be met by an even greater number of leftists of various sorts, self-described “anti-fascists” and “anti-racists.”

Violence ensued.

Immediately, elites in Washington D.C. and their fellow travelers in Big Media (of both the “mainstream” and “conservative” varieties) laid the blame solely at the feet of “white supremacists.”  Every politician, Democrat and Republican alike, and every commentator, Fox News contributors and talk radio hosts no less than their leftist counterparts on the other networks, spared no opportunity to show the world that they were even more repulsed by this exhibition of “white supremacy” than the next person.

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Make no mistakes about it, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the fever-pitched waxing of indignation, was political theater at its absolute best—or worst.  It is inexcusable that anyone who purports to be in the know, let alone those, like politicians and media figures, who are expected to be knowledgeable of current events, should not have been able to discern from  the jump the gist of what occurred in Charlottesville on that fateful day.

President Trump elicited much criticism for claiming at the time that there were good people amongst both the demonstrators and the counter-demonstrators, and that both sides contributed to the violence.  The President did misspeak, but not in the ways in which his critics charge:

First, it is manifestly absurd to characterize as “good” those—like the militant leftists who converged upon Charlottesville—who routinely violate the Constitutional rights to speech, assembly, property, and bodily integrity of, not only those of their fellow citizens with whom they disagree, but as well those of their fellow citizens who they deem insufficiently supportive of their “anti-fascist” agenda.

Second, not a single hair on the head of a single person would have been harmed, much less would anyone have been killed, had it not been for the “anti-fascists” and “anti-racists,” the “counter-demonstrators” who initiated the violence.

The facts:

(1)The organizers of the Unite the Right rally acted lawfully, availing themselves of their Constitutional right as Americans to peaceful assembly.  The organizers applied for their permit months in advance of their demonstration.  It was granted and then withdrawn.  The organizers appealed and, thanks in no small part to the American Civil Liberties Union—hardly a right-wing operation—a judge determined that the city of Charlottesville had no legal grounds on which to deny them a permit.

In other words, the organizers of the Unite the Right rally acted in good faith, with fidelity to the law, every step of the way.

(2)The counter-demonstrators, in stark contrast, conducted themselves lawlessly: They had no permit and never even applied for one. Quite the contrary: The “anti-fascists” armed themselves with weaponry—clubs; bricks; bottles and balloons filled with cement, urine, and feces; bear mace; baseball bats; bows and arrows; and a makeshift flamethrower—and, quite literally, hit the streets. They formed mobs and took to intersections, blocking traffic and attacking motorists.

For this reason, because of their lawlessness, their flagrant criminality, it is a misnomer to describe the “anti-fascists” as counter-demonstrators.  They composed a mob.

(3)It’s true that a few of the demonstrators were seen sporting KKK and neo-Nazi paraphernalia.  It is equally true that the vast majority of the rally-goers who gathered in Charlottesville were doing no such thing, and that several of these endeavored to remove those showcasing KKK and Nazi symbols.

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The lion’s share of rally attendees descended upon Charlottesville on that fateful day not to affirm “white supremacy,” “white nationalism,” or any racial fiction that the media would ascribe to them, but, rather, to demonstrate against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, an act that symbolizes to many patriotic Americans the radical left’s ongoing attempt to fundamentally transform Southern culture specifically and that of the United States of America generally into something in the image of their own ideology.

And, to repeat, there weren’t so much as dirty looks exchanged, to say nothing of overt violence, until lawless leftwing mobs, so-called “Antifa” and Black Lives Matter, in particular, arrived and instigated every bit of it.

(4)The foregoing facts were available at the time.  Big Media—both the “mainstream” or “liberal” media as well as such “conservative” media as Fox News, talk radio, National Review, The New York Post, etc.—just weren’t interested.

Those who were interested had to go underground, to the internet, to Youtube, to gather eyewitness testimony from those who were actually in Charlottesville.  The most reliable testimony comes from the members of several “Patriots’” organizations, self-described “civic nationalists” (as opposed to racial nationalists) who came to Virginia to keep peace and safeguard the Constitutional rights of their fellow American citizens (See here and here).

Most of these men (and some women) are military and police veterans who remain committed to upholding the oath to the American Constitution that they pledged upon embarking upon their careers in law enforcement.  These are the same people who those in Big Conservatism (the Big Con) tirelessly “thank” for their service.  Yet when these retired soldiers and officers of the law were physically besieged by leftist criminals andcorrupt Charlottesville police alike, Big Conservatives were all too eager to side with militant and radical leftists and blame the protestors and these Constitutionalists for the unprovoked violence that they suffered.

(5)This brings us to the next point: As some of us knew then, and as the Heaphy Reporthas subsequently confirmed, violence would have been averted not only had leftist street thugs shown the same respect for the law as that shown by the Unite the Right demonstrators.  It would have been averted had the governments of Virginia and Charlottesville—the governor and mayor, the state and local police—and the University of Virginia conducted themselves more responsibly.

The governor declared a state of emergency, in effect canceling the demonstrators’ permit at the last minute, while the Charlottesville mayor ordered the police commissioner to in turn order his officers to stand down.

But even this way of putting the matter is understatement. The police didn’t just do nothing as innocent citizens were assaulted. They encouraged the violence by forcing the Unite the Right rally attendees to vacate the premises by way of walking through the wall of volatile leftists that were waiting for them.

From these facts, we can deduce another: Contrary to the conventional (Politically Correct) wisdom, far from being aggressors, the only party in this story that is innocent of provoking violence is that of the rally demonstrators.

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Fairness, however, forces us to go one step further: It is the rally attendees, and them alone, who showed respect for America, for its traditions, laws, and the Constitution, for preserving the history of their country, civility, free speech, and peaceful assembly.  No other actor in this melodrama can claim credit for doing the same.  Every other actor, in fact, revealed themselves as decidedly anti-American.

A final point: While the overt left has long ago put us on notice as to its desire to destroy (“fundamentally transform”) America as it has existed, the response of Big Conservatism to Charlottesville proved, if proof was still needed, that Big Cons are but an alt-left.  Big Cons incessantly whine over the left’s suppression of free speech whenever it is one of their own—like, say, Ben Shapiro—who is prevented from speaking at a college campus.  Yet their eagerness to buy hook, line, and sinker the interpretation of Charlottesville favored by Antifa and Black Lives Matter confirms that they care as much about protecting the free speech rights of those to their right as they care about “supporting the troops” and “blue lives” when law enforcement veterans are lumped in by the left with “racists,” “fascists,” “white supremacists,” and, simply, “the alt-right.”

Never again can anyone within the Big Con be regarded with seriousness when they espouse platitudes concerning the Constitution, free speech, tolerance, civility, or, for that matter, respect for veterans and law enforcement. Though few people have yet to grasp this, the truth is that Charlottesville comes as close as anything to serving as the criterion, the test, for determining one’s commitment to the Constitution, law and order, free speech, civility, tolerance, and all of the rest.

The Big Con failed this test miserably.

The Best of Jack Kerwick

Jack Kerwick [send him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/08/jack-kerwick/revisiting-charlottesville-one-year-later/