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Re: [\|/FL] OT: A note on evolution vs. intelligent design, analysis by Israel Ramirez, retired Biopsychologist.

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• Gene Schulz 

  To my erudite colleagues:  I sure hope you are finding ways to pass on your knowledge to the next generations of Psychologists beyond this listserve. 

  
  

  The best treatise I have found for "Intelligent Design" is "The Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel, a journalist who interviewed some leading scientists in several different scientific fields. He acknowledges change over time (which I would call evolution) but attacks Darwinism as the ultimate theory on the development of the human race.  Unlike the Creationists who take the Bible literally (and can't explain how the kangaroos got from Australia to Noah's Ark in time to be saved from the flood) Strobel does not claim that it all happened a few thousand years ago. Strobel "evolved" from skepticism to Christianity and has written several books defending the faith. My own interest has been in the question of the evolution of human and animal consciousness, and the ongoing source of our conscious experience. I recall a quote from my reading years ago: "There is nothing more empirical than our own experience." In today's NY Times there is a book review by John Williams of "Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness" by Tim Parks. While I am always intrigued by reports that suggest consciousness beyond the brain (e.g. in ghosts) this book is not likely to get my attention, because it is too far out even for me.  

  
  

  I did come across a significant article in yesterday's NYTimes Weekend Arts I yesterday (Nov.22) about the vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, who suffered from vocal paralysis after she had been drugged and raped while a freshman at University of Michigan. She kept it as a secret for over 10 years. To quote from the NYT: "Soon after that 2013 performance of 'Dithyramb,' Ms Dhegrae, the founder of the Resonant Bodies Festifal of contemporary vocal music, found she could no longer sing."  The article, by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, describes the long process of training, that included martial arts, that allowed her to regain her voice. It also involved her decision to disregard previous advice against revealing what had happened to her. 

  
  

  Gene

  
  

  John Aurbach

  Damon,

  
  

  It’s late, but there is considerable debate on the links between Darwin and the British liberalism of the early 19th century.  He was apparently influenced mainly by Malthus’s “Essay on the Principle of Population” and appears to have had the typical political views of a 19th-century British liberal—individualist and also abolitionist with regard to slavery—but in his theory, there is none or little of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that will eventually produce the “best” outcome for all concerned.  There is instead recognition that sometimes good outcomes for an individual organism are bad for the group and vice versa.  Darwin also had started wanting to be a minister, but his discovery of natural selection created a crisis of faith in him that he could never resolve because one clear implication of natural selection is that God did not create all the animals. He became an agnostic as a result. This crisis of faith may have dampened Darwin’s wholesale acceptance of the notion of progress, but I would have to spend some time researching the idea.  The subtlety of his thought, his understanding that biological and social evolution may diverge, is one reason that we still rely heavily on Darwin but think of Herbert Spencer, one of the leading figures of the the 19th Century, as an historical curiosity.  Spencer really did believe that progress, the improvement of both individuals and society at large, was an inevitability, and that “survival of the fittest” (Spencer’s phrase), hence laissez faire capitalism, was the means to do it.  Hence, he opposed welfare state policies that were actually championed by Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative Party as interfering with the competition he thought was necessary for progress, and his ideas remain one of the pillars of anarchs-capitalism or libertarianism, but even so, Spencer, to his credit, is not so easily pegged, not really that much in league with modern American conservatism, insofar as modern American conservatism (a) is so heavily influenced by the Conservative Christian thought that Spencer, an agnostic, abhorred and (b) was also influenced, until recently, by a muscular foreign interventionism.  He was a feminist (at least in his early days), an anti-imperialist, and an abolitionist, however much he also believed in a natural hierarchy of races that he thought resulted from competition and “survival of the fittest." 

  
  

  Finally, my cell phone typing is terrible, but weirdly enough, I think and write in complete sentences.  It has been this way ever since my 10th grade English teacher taught me how to write.  You may not remember this, but I was executive editor of our college newspaper.  I have written this way since I was 15, although it took many years to find my personal and therefore authorial voice.

  
  

  John
  

  
  

  Damon LaBarbera

  John,

  Was Darwin influenced by laissez faire economics--that competition leads to maximum utility? Would he have been reviled politically if he had dropped the idea of progress? 

  
  

  Hofstadter had a book on Spencer. My recollection is he described a tightly wound, asocial individual. What in particular was Spencer's idea of progress--a better human? a better economy? a more efficient society? 

  cell

  And, at a personal level, which I hope you don't mind--how are you getting such prose from your cellphone. This can't be thumb typing.

  
  

  Damon L

  
  

  
  

  ~Psychology Practice in Florida
  

  Some thoughts:

  
  

  I agree with Damon that evolution through natural selection does NOT involve progress, only adaptation. Even Darwin himself seems to have been confused about this idea, and Herbert Spencer, the founder of Social Darwinism, even more so. Alternatively, the only progress under the theory of natural selection is toward greater adaptation, not toward higher forms of life.  No matter how “evolved” my brain, a panda is better at being a panda than I am.

  
  

  Also, intelligent design may be a true explanation of evolution, but it can never be a scientific one.  Why?  First, intelligent design is not a falsifiable theory, but natural selection is. Second, intelligent design posits a non-natural cause (i.e., an intelligent designer), and scientific explanation is, or requires, natural explanation.

  
  

  John S. Auerbach, PhD
  
  

  Sent from my iPhone

  
  

  Bruce Borkosky
  

  Robert Hazen has been a prolific author and presenter on the evolution of minerals. It seems to me that a major flaw in creationism is viewing life through the prism of today's mineralogy. Earth was much different 3.5 billion years ago. Hazen makes a convincing argument that BOTH minerals and life evolved together - i.e., that life cause the Earth's mineral diversity to explode, which enriched life's diversity, etc. So, we don't really know what early forms of life looked like or how they worked.

  
  

  
  

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_evolution  
  

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms  

  https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/research/mineral-evolution  

  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-of-minerals/  

  
  

  Gene Schulze  wrote:

  ~Psychology Practice in Florida
  

  
  

  Douglas Axe raised an interesting and important problem concerning the evolution of proteins. He failed to solve it and concluded that evolution can’t have happened. His reasoning is that if you try, for a little while, to figure out how proteins evolve, and fail to find a suitable path, then proteins can’t have evolved.

  Personally, I see this as an interesting biological problem and hope you share my interest in scientific mysteries.

  Background

  The machinery of your body is mostly made up of proteins. These can consist of hundreds of amino acids strung together. After the string has been assembled, the protein assembles itself into a complex shape as you can see in this diagram.[1]

  

  Proteins can become useless if you change the amino acids at key points. Many proteins won’t work correctly unless they have the standard shape and that shape is the result of many individual amino acids acting together. That’s part of the reason why many mutations are harmful. It’s very easy to break something complicated so that it doesn’t work.

  So, it’s hard to understand how natural selection produced the complicated 3D structures in proteins through an evolutionary trial-and-error process. One biologist has described the evolutionary process as “something like close to a miracle.”[2]

  The problem becomes worse when you think about the origin of life. The very first organisms would have needed many complicated proteins in order to live.

  Douglas Axe’s contribution

  He showed that simple mutations are extremely unlikely to convert the overall shape of a protein into a new useful shape.[3] [4] [5] [6] Mutations that alter the shape of a protein tend to make it instable or useless. He concluded that since this type of evolutionary change can’t easily produce new useful proteins, then evolution can’t work.

  Why he’s wrong

  We know that this conclusion is wrong because scientists can trace the evolution of many individual proteins by comparing their structure and sequence of amino acids. This chart traces the ancestry of the globin family of genes among mammals and birds.[7] The ancestor of birds and mammals must have had three different globin genes and these evolved into the several genes present in modern animals.

  

  This family of genes is extremely old, appearing in bacteria, plants, and animals.[8] The only way to explain the similarities among globin genes is to accept that they evolved, something that Douglas Axe says is impossible.

  Unsolved issues

  We still don’t know how the first complex proteins came into being. Here’s a couple of possibilities:

  1. Maybe they arose from random short proteins. These sometimes enhance growth of bacteria[9] and sometimes catalyze (control) useful chemical reactions.[10] Evolution could have gradually lengthened them, making them bigger and more complex over time.[11]
  2. Small proteins can combine to make a big protein. For example, scientists have strong evidence that machinery for photosynthesis evolved through several small units that evolved separately and eventually combined. I describe that in another answer.[12]
  3. Genes sometimes get duplicated accidentally. The extra copy can drift randomly for many generations without harm because it is unneeded. Over time, it may, by chance, acquire a useful function. There’s good evidence that this happens.[13]

  Conclusion

  Douglas Axe provided a useful service to the scientific community by showing some ways that proteins couldn’t have evolved. But that’s not the same as showing that it’s impossible for proteins to have evolved in other ways.

  More to read

  Here’s a fuller rebuttal of Douglas Axe, pointing out that “Axe ignores the vast amounts of evidence that support evolution that come from comparative genomics, genetics, palaeontology, embryology, anatomy, evo-devo, etc.”