Sticky Religie & Spiritualiteit

[tbeest]

Extremisme is geen afwijking.

Klik om te verkleinen...

Maar gezond is het toch niet? Hoe zou je het dan wel omschrijven?

 

[Panzer VIII]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9e2vnQgrl0


Dit is toch gewoon zielig? En sorry dat ik het zeg, maar zo iemand zijn plaats is eerder in een psychiatrische instelling vind ik

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Dat soort mensen zullen zich als een monster gedragen zodra ze de kans krijgen, gelukkig zijn er nog niet zo veel van die extremisten.

 

[Arminius]

Geen idee, extremisme kent veel vormen. Probeer het maar eens te definiëren.

 

[tbeest]

Dat soort mensen zullen zich als een monster gedragen zodra ze de kans krijgen, gelukkig zijn er nog niet zo veel van die extremisten.

Klik om te verkleinen...

Inderdaad stel dat er ooit moslimrebellen in België of Nederland zijn die hier de sharia willen invoeren zijn het van die mensen.

En daarom is het misschien geen slecht idee om extremisme te zien als een vorm van een psychische afwijking. Een soort "verslaving" van het geloof die een te erge vorm aan neemt

 

[Arminius]

Die jongens stellen niets voor, niet teveel van aantrekken.

 

[tbeest]

Dan nog, dat betekent niet dat we ze niet kunnen helpen

 

[Panzer VIII]

Die jongens stellen niets voor, niet teveel van aantrekken.

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Ja maar het is wel beangstigend om ze te horen.. en nu maar hopen dat ze klein in getal blijven

 

[Arminius]

Ja maar het is wel beangstigend om ze te horen.. en nu maar hopen dat ze klein in getal blijven

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Hun getal is klein. En als ik mij niet vergis is 'Sharia 4 Belgium' 'Sharia 4 Nederland'.

Het zijn de mensen die je niet hoort of ziet, Jihad netwerken enzovoorts.

 

[Panzer VIII]

Had liever katholieke extremisten eigenlijk :d

 

[Amand]

Dat soort mensen zullen zich als een monster gedragen zodra ze de kans krijgen, gelukkig zijn er nog niet zo veel van die extremisten.

Klik om te verkleinen...

zij zijn volgelingen van osama bin laden en osama bin laden is door de geleerden in islam als de vriend van satan verklaard.
en dit bewijst dat wij moslims niet zo zijn.maar dat zij de volgelingen zijn van satan net hoe satan haat en wraak tussen mensen brengt.

MVG

 

[HMT]

Had liever katholieke extremisten eigenlijk :d

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Tempeliers en de kruistochten zijn toch nog wel een tandje extremer dan de gemiddelde hedendaagse Moslim extremist!?

Sowieso alles, en daarbij ook iedereen, dat op een dergelijke wijze in het religieuze spectrum doorslaat (naar alle kanten, zowel passief, praktiserend als agressief) en handelt 'in naam van god' is in mijn optiek twijfelachtig...

 

[mat]

zij zijn volgelingen van osama bin laden en osama bin laden is door de geleerden in islam als de vriend van satan verklaard.
en dit bewijst dat wij moslims niet zo zijn.maar dat zij de volgelingen zijn van satan net hoe satan haat en wraak tussen mensen brengt.
MVG

Klik om te verkleinen...

Meh... Vind persoonlijk dat net de koran nogal voor haat en wraak tussen mensen zorgt...
"Er is een vernederende kastijding voor de ongelovigen"
"Zeg tegen de ongelovigen; gij zult worden teneergeslagen en in de hel worden verzameld"
"Er zal een grote straf voor hen zijn in het hiernamaals"
"god heeft de overtreders niet lief"

Als er echter iets is waar je niet over kan discussiëren met een gelovige, is het wel geloof en wetenschap

 

[klusserdeklus]

Geloof in datgene waar je je goed bij voelt,en laat anderen hier zelf over beslissen of ze geloven of niet.

 

[Amand]

Meh... Vind persoonlijk dat net de koran nogal voor haat en wraak tussen mensen zorgt...
"Er is een vernederende kastijding voor de ongelovigen"
"Zeg tegen de ongelovigen; gij zult worden teneergeslagen en in de hel worden verzameld"
"Er zal een grote straf voor hen zijn in het hiernamaals"
"god heeft de overtreders niet lief"

Als er echter iets is waar je niet over kan discussiëren met een gelovige, is het wel geloof en wetenschap

Klik om te verkleinen...

de koran heeft nog echte vertaling genaamd de tafsier.
waar alles in elk detail wordt vertaald en ieder heeft zijn eigen interpretatie en hiervoor is die tafsier heel nuttig voor.hierbij laat ik het ook.
ik denk dat de meeste niet willen discussieren over elk onderwerp

 

[tbeest]

de koran heeft nog echte vertaling genaamd de tafsier.
waar alles in elk detail wordt vertaald en ieder heeft zijn eigen interpretatie en hiervoor is die tafsier heel nuttig voor.hierbij laat ik het ook.
ik denk dat de meeste niet willen discussieren over elk onderwerp

Klik om te verkleinen...

lekker boeiend jouw religie

 

[DKR]

Religie parasiteert op angst, twijfel en verdriet waardoor religieuzen per definitie hypocriet zijn.

 

[mat]

de koran heeft nog echte vertaling genaamd de tafsier.
waar alles in elk detail wordt vertaald en ieder heeft zijn eigen interpretatie en hiervoor is die tafsier heel nuttig voor.hierbij laat ik het ook.

Klik om te verkleinen...

Ben ik van op de hoogte, zal me niet snel gaan moeien als ik onvoldoende afweet van een thema.

Heb echt wel respect voor mensen die geloven, hoor. Of dat nu in god, allah of een fles Rothschild is, als zij daar troost en steun in vinden of een levensdoel, waarom zou ik daarover moeten oordelen? Waar ik wel een probleem mee heb, is de indoctrinatie van kleinsaf, de absolute waarheden en verplicht te volgen voorschriften die altijd opgelegd worden door de 'instellingen' van een bepaald geloof. En laat die voorschriften er nu net vaak voor zorgen dat je in vrijheden beperkt wordt.

Religie is voor mij opium van en voor het volk, maar die keuze staat hen natuurlijk vrij.

 

[houston]

De man die jaren lang Athiest was en nu niet meer.

Gratis PDF boek van James George Defares uit Nederland.


[Link niet meer beschikbaar]

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---------- Post toegevoegd Wed 6 Mar 2013 om 01:23 ----------

The Darwin delusion

Since Darwinism, a theory positing that species evolve by blind chance, rules out the 'guiding hand of God in the creation of man', it is an intellectual stumbling block for a belief in God and religion. In chapter 30 of the BOOK it is clearly shown that Darwinism is dead-wrong, that the emperor has no clothes.

When at the turn of the nineteenth century Mendel's laws of genetics were (re)discovered, Darwin's original theory was in deep trouble, since Mendel's laws were totally at variance with the notion of evolution by random errors (in the genes).

Darwin's hypothesis could only be rescued by (don't be put off) mathematizing it, that is setting up a mathematical model, just like economists do in their field. Just like all the econometric models are invalid (because none of them predicted the crisis of 2008), the Darwin model, known as neo-Darwinism, developed by the Oxford school before the second World War, is false for a similar reason.

As a former professor of mathematical biology the author, Defares, is fully qualified to explain why Darwinism (not to be confused with evolution) should be relegated to the waste-basket of history. Here only one reason is presented. It's easily understood if we take economics as an analogy. We have all of us experienced the crash of the economy in 2008: a sudden fall in the gently rising curve of economic growth.

Now, our clever professors of economics have devised mathematical models (in computers) to 'predict' or 'prescribe' the changes of the economy in time. Since none of these models has predicted the crash all these econometric models should be relegated to the waste-basket where they belong. Back to the drawing board!

Well, something similar is the case with Darwinism, or, more correctly, neo-Darwinism, which is a mathematical model. In full agreement with Darwin's own intuitive notion this model prescribes ('predicts') the evolution of (new) species as a slow, ever increasing process in time, without any stagnation or sudden swings. This is nicely expressed in Darwin 's dictum "Natura non facit saltum", or, 'Nature makes no jumps'. An analogy is a computer program (model) predicting that the economy will grow forever at, say, about one percent a year. No stagnation or downswings (crises) are allowed.

In the real world the fossil record did not appear to contradict this steady rise of Darwin's curve at a snail's pace, where the creation of any new species would require millions of years. In the eighties of the last century this picture changed completely, when professor Gould from Harvard and professor Eldredge from Columbia University discovered, what is since known as the 'Cambrian explosion'.

These paleontologists established that more than five hundred million years ago all higher life forms came into being within a brief time-span of some 50,000 years, instead of the millions of years required by Darwin 's computer model! These findings caused a sensation at the time, illustrated by the headline in The New York Times: Spectacular Fossils Record Early Riot of Creation

The paleontologist Dr. Jan Armstrong said in this article: 'The findings show that you could have the formation of an entirely new type of animal within thousands of years.'

Darwinism demands ('predicts') a time-span of millions of years for the formation of a new animal. This fact alone relegates neo-Darwinism ('Darwinism') to the waste-basket of history.

There is more… Sudden jumps are followed by millions of years of 'no change' in the animal species. The real curve as found in the fossil record resembles a staircase rather than a ramp as Darwinism requires!

We end with the following quote from professor Eldredge's book Reinventing Darwin:

"We provided the empirical proof that, contrary to the time-honored picture of gradual evolutionary change, most species virtually cease to change once they end up in the fossil record. This is a phenomenon that we called 'stagnation'. We pointed out that Darwinism clings to the myth of gradual change and transformation, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

Darwinism is, like Marxism, a myth, a pseudo-science, kept alive as a bulwark against the curse of God and religion by rabid atheists like Richard Dawkins, a bit as Marxism is still maintained by Fidel Castro as a bulwark against the ills of capitalism. Nomen est omen. The name tells the whole story: 'ism'. Darwinism. We don't have Einsteinism, for the simple reason that it is real science, not scientism.

Conclusion: Darwinism, the theory of 'blind chance', is invalid an thus should constitute no intellectual obstacle for the belief in God and creation. Whether such a belief is justified is another matter, the center theme of the BOOK.


For an in-depth critique of Darwinism please turn to chapter 30 of the BOOK.

Chapter 30: Sense and nonsense of Darwinism

A recent Gallup poll showed that some ninety percent of Americans believe in the existence of God. The results for the European Union are very different. Less than fifty percent believe—more or less—in God. Fifty-two percent do not believe in God and call themselves atheist. Christian commentators, such as the influential and charismatic creationist Arthur Wilder-Smith (chemist, three doctorates, and six professorships, 1915–1995) attribute this "alarmingly high" percentage to the "brainwashing" by Marxism and Darwinism. That the latter is the main factor follows from the answers given by the interviewees. Eighty-five percent of this group said that their conviction was based on Darwinism. Darwinism has shown that we descend from ape-like ancestors by pure chance and "survival of the fittest," so they reason. We're the end product of a blind impersonal process. What need then for a Creator, God? True? Not true? Let's investigate.

Since this is a highly controversial theme where emotions may run high and opinions may be diametrically opposed—Darwinian atheists versus creationists—while the material is highly technical, it seems appropriate to present my modest qualifications for evaluating the merits of Darwinism.

Let me start by assuring you that I have no secret agenda, like trying to defend the Christian bulwark against the barbarians at the gate. More to the point is the fact that during my years in academia, I have—among other things—worked as a bio-mathematician and held a chair in mathematical biology at the University of Leyden, the Netherlands, and various posts in the U.S., amongst which visiting lecturer at the division of mathematical biology in Harvard. Why is this relevant to our subject? Briefly, because the claims of Darwinism stand or fall with the validity of a mathematical model called—don't be put off by names—"population genetics," developed by R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane. Darwinism in its original sense died a quiet death with the discovery of the laws of inheritance (genes), but was resurrected under the name neo-Darwinism by mathematizing it, i.e. setting up a mathematical model. Without its mathematical underpinnings Darwinism is, as Richard Dawkins acknowledges, not viable. The validity of neo-Darwinism thus stands or falls with the validity of the Darwinian mathematical model.

This fact of life explains why bio-mathematicians are among the most qualified (and feared) critics of Darwinism and their proponents. Let me illustrate. In 1967 biologists and mathematicians held a joint symposium at the Wistar Institute in the U.S. to seek a mathematically acceptable basis for the assumption that "random mutations" could be the driving force behind the process of evolution, the basic tenet of Darwinism. The symposium ended in a fiasco, or, rather, a farce.

Every time the math established the improbability of an assumption, the Darwinists responded that something must be wrong with the math because of the simple fact that evolution had taken place—and, of course—by the mechanism of "random mutations." Moreover, they wielded another argument: time. Given sufficient time—millions, no billions of years—even the statistically most improbable event can happen. Such a claim is as absurd as the thesis that given enough time a bridge player will eventually receive a perfect hand. The stormy confrontation between the hard scientists and the Darwinists during this symposium is set down in the proceedings,1 under the title Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.
Mathematicians are welcome at the high table of Darwinism (one of them, Sir Ronald Fisher, co-inventor of neo-Darwinism, was a distinguished mathematician himself) as long as they behave themselves. If Airbus turns a deaf ear to the warnings of mathematics, the plane will crash. If evolution biologists do the same, nothing happens. Let's continue.

The quicksand of neo-Darwinism

Let's first confront the question: "Is Darwin's theory of evolution the highway to atheism?" Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling book The God Delusion and practicing atheist, leaves little doubt about it. The litmus test is of course the belief of the Darwinists themselves. If Dawkins is right and if you're an evolution biologist of Darwinian persuasion, you must be very dimwitted indeed if you're not an atheist, or, worse, if you are religious. Let's take a look at the top and seek advice from professor Stephen Gould from Harvard. He points out,2 "A considerable number of prominent Darwinists were religious and saw no problem about being so." It suffices to mention two giants in the field: Professor Charles Walcott, the discoverer of the famous Burgess Shale fossils, a fervent Darwinian and confirmed Christian, and professor Theodesius Dobhansky, a strict Russian-orthodox Christian. Gould concludes:

Either half of my colleagues are very stupid, or the science of Darwinism is just as compatible with conventional religion as with atheism.

Unless you share the belief of the Darwinist and Christian, Kenneth Miller (chapter 34) that our body is the end-product of (random) mutations and our soul is given by God, Darwinism is an intellectual challenge to faith and religion, for the simple reason that the existence of man is exclusively determined by blind chance (random mutations). Goal-oriented creativity plays no part whatsoever. There is no room for an "Intelligence" (God), who created life with the intention that billions of years later modern man, fashioned after "His own image," should see the light of day. But isn't everything concerning us as a species a matter of luck? If an asteroid had not wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, maybe Tyrannosaurus Rex would have written these lines. Man—homo sapiens—wouldn't have had a ghost of a chance!

True, but this is a different kind of chance, of good luck. Here it is conceivable that, just as in the case of the crossing of the Jordan by the Israelites when the right "timing" of the naturally occurring mud slide temporarily dried up the river (see chapter 28), God may have had a hand in the timing (and direction) of the famous asteroid. The asteroid—blind chance or teleology?

One thing is certain. If it had been, to speak in biblical terms, a divine act, then it is possible that all God would have had to do is was alter the "timing" by only a few hours. How's that? March 23, 1989. Only a week later astronomers discovered that mankind had miraculously been saved from near-total extinction. An asteroid with a diameter of one km crossed the earth orbit at a speed of 120,000 kilometers per hour, just six hours before the earth would reach that spot. It packed enough kinetic energy to wipe out all life on the continent affected—Europe, America ,or Africa. A little thought-experiment: if an angry God would have intended to punish mankind on that day, his "experiment" would have had a margin of error of one in a trillion (one with twelve zeros). Conversely, God would only have needed to advance the timing by a "trillion of a fraction" to make the impact happen.3

What's the point of this story? This empirical fact leaves room for the speculative thought that the end of the dinosaur era sixty-five million years ago may not have been just a matter of pure luck, but that the cosmic intelligence—God—had purposefully modified the path of the asteroid by a mere "nano correction." Pure speculation, but food for thought!

But as to the Darwinian mechanism of evolution—random mutations, that is blind chance—the situation is totally different. The hypothesis that here God can "twiddle with the knobs" like in the Bible miracles (chapter 28) would only lead to absurdities.

But before we take up our story one thing needs emphasizing. A source of confusion is that the term "evolution" is often used for two totally different things, namely for "fact" and "mechanism." Evolution as fact is literally engraved in the fossil archive and is visible in the "geological column," a vertical "thin slice" of the strata, as can be seen in the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The geological column is a kind of computer model of the complete sequence of strata (sediments) built up in the course of millions of years. The age of the strata—the lowest is the oldest—can be determined by radiometric dating techniques. Almost naturally the lowest (oldest) strata of the geological column contain the simplest organisms, like blue algae, bacteria and so-called stromatolites.

Only much higher in the column one finds the fossils of the dinosaurs. Imagine the reverse situation: dinosaurs in the lowest stratum devoid of blue algae and bacteria, and high up in the column only the most primitive organisms, blue algae and bacteria. If that were the case, then, "evolution" as "fact," i.e., the formation of higher organisms from lower, would be out of the window.

The anti-Darwinist or creationist might still object: "The fact that organisms in the lower strata are simpler than those in the higher ones doesn't mean a thing. There is no proof that the 'younger' organism (in the higher stratum) has evolved from the earlier ones in the lower strata. The "temporal" relationship as seen in the column is wrongly interpreted as a causal one, a fallacy mockingly expressed by David Hume's famous line: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. (thereafter, so therefore)." If you stick to this philosophical view, you deny, with Hume, the very concept of causality and thus the possibility of doing science or even solving a murder.

Still, the quibbler does have a valid point. The fossil archive is very incomplete. No one has ever observed in the geological record the gradual separation of a mother species into two daughter species over millions of years. "Oh, is that so?" Wrong. There are some rare examples where such a splitting off has been seen. It suffices to present a single example. This is called "proof of principle." Here, the proof that evolution is a "fact." The next passage—rather detailed—may be skipped by the more casual reader.

The manner in which new species are formed was already suggested by Darwin in his book The Origin of Species: a trunk branching like a tree. To illustrate the idea I'll give an absurd example.

The early descendants of Adam and Eve were very much alike, also with respect to height, so it may be assumed. In the course of time differences in height developed and became more pronounced. Today height varies between, say, 1.60 m and 1.90 m. What would happen if our species would split off into two different species a million years from now? Then, in this playful example, the small individuals and the tall ones each go their own way, with some overlap in height. Another million years later the short species has a mean height, say, of 1.40 m with a spread of 20 cm (so, between 1.20 and 1.60 m), while the tall species has a mean height of, say, 2.20 m with a similar spread (so, between 2.00 m and 2.40 m). There is no more overlap between the short and the tall varieties: the mother species had died out and two new species have emerged. That's how evolution evolves! This is precisely what Thomas Cronin and Cynthia Schneider found.4
It concerns the diatomaceous clay, which constitutes the purification matrix of your Olympian-size swimming pool. (The reader may skip this passage.)
Rhizosolenia belongs to the genus of diatoms, single-cell organisms that live in the ocean and are enclosed by silicate cell walls with a unique and complex shape. When the organisms die, these glasslike coverings sink to the ocean floor where they form an extremely compact sediment over the course of millions of years. In sediments dated 1.7 million years ago, one finds two species with the Latin names—don't be put off—Rhizosolenia praebergonii and Rhizosolenia bergonii. By going down to the deeper sediments it is possible to follow these two species back in time. What emerges?

Three billion years ago a single species started to split off in two and this process was completed after 200,000 years. The fossil archive of this split has been fully preserved. If a species gradually bifurcates into two species, you might expect to find an intermediate form—a missing link—in the fossil archive, as was found here. This is one of the rare findings in which this branching process is actually readable in the fossil archive. Since new species are constantly being formed—at least according to theory—one would expect this process still being in full swing today, complete with its intermediate forms. Are there any examples? The different finches—all with their own shape of their beaks—on the Galapagos islands and the new species of fish in Lake Victoria are two classic examples, but a more telling example with intermediate forms is to be found elsewhere.

The Herring Gull (Larus argentus) and the small gull named Lesser Black-Backed Gull (Larus fuscus) are both found in northern Europe and are classified as different species on the basis of standard criteria. The birds possess a characteristic color, the markings on their legs are different, they nest at separate locations and they do not interbreed. Even an amateur bird-watcher could easily tell them apart. In North America only the Herring Gull is found. If we take leave of the American Herring Gull and travel west to Siberia and northern Europe something strange happens. As we move from Alaska westwards the color of the Larus argentus gradually changes. Originally silver colored (argenta), it becomes increasingly darker until at some location in Siberia it has become so dark that the bird can be identified as a Lesser Black-backed Gull (Larus fuscus).

These birds are an example of so-called "ring species," a group of organisms whose varieties at opposite ends may easily pass the test of different species, but in which the extreme specimens are mutually linked by intermediate forms. What confusion! Are the American Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-Backed Gull two different species or varieties of a single species?

If we hadn't undertaken our madcap expedition, we would have been dead sure these are different species. Now, with the Siberian intermediate forms identified, the situation is less certain. Only some 200,000 years into the future, if the intermediate varieties have by that time disappeared (for example, by extinction or "isolation"), you could solemnly declare: "Forsooth, these are different species indeed!" Still, ring species may well represent an intriguing visual picture of the process of evolution: gradual, via intermediate stages.
Conclusion

Both the fossil order (archive) and the confirmation of the process of speciation (the formation of new species) by branching, as proposed by Darwin, establishes the reality of evolution ("evolution as fact"). Neither dinosaur, nor man, suddenly appeared on the stage "de novo" as the Creation story implies, but "evolved" from lower forms over the course of millions of years.
"Non-Darwinian evolution": grist to the mill of special creation

The "newer" fossil finds that have mainly been uncovered—both literally and figuratively—by Stephen Jay Could and his co-workers in the '80s confront Darwinism with a serious challenge. By the way, when we use the term Darwinism we do not, as explained before, mean evolution as "fact," nor the evolution of species by the branching process, as first suggested by Darwin, but refer to the hypothetical mechanism of "random mutations" and "survival of the fittest," the crux of Darwin's theory. Classical Darwinism (technically called neo-Darwinism) starts from the assumption that evolution operates along gradual lines: very small changes (via mutations) that in the course of millions of years exert their transforming influence, a bit like the apocryphal dripping tap that eventually perforates the victim's skull. If you have enough time anything is possible and billions of years is a lot of time.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is the fact that there are enormous gaps in the fossil record. Far worse, though, for neo-Darwinism, is the fairly recent discovery that 540 million years ago, at the start of the Cambrian, quite suddenly, in an enormous explosion of life itself, multi-cellular life, appeared on earth.

Before that instant in geological time, only single-celled organisms, like bacteria, etc., existed. At least that is how it looked. The explosion of higher life forms was so sudden and occurred in such a brief (geologic) time interval that it rocked the foundations of the theory of neo-Darwinism. Even a learned editorial in the New York Times at the time suggested that a far more reasonable theory for the origin of "higher" life than Darwinism was—given the facts—the activity of a "higher intelligence": God, then.
* * *

Let me repeat. In Darwin's footsteps Darwinism starts from the assumption that evolution is a gradual never-ending process of minute changes (variations) taking place over millions of years, without any breaks or fits and starts.5

In Darwin's day, nothing was yet known about genes and the laws of heredity. The so-called modern synthesis, called neo-Darwinism, is a splendid mathematical structure (it is called a "mathematical model") based on the laws of inheritance. Developed by Professor R.A. Fisher of Cambridge (1890–1962), it forms the theoretical foundation of Darwinism. Does this have a name? Yes, it is called—don't be alarmed—"population genetics." Population genetics "predicts" that (newly formed) species change with time at the pace of a turtle and that there can be no stagnation or sudden spurts. So, slow, gradual changes in the fossil archive, no stagnation. That is the core prediction of neo-Darwinism on the basis of its mathematical equations (mathematical model).6

Ouch! Regrettably reality is very different. There's no question of gradualness, only fits and starts. That is the reality of the fossil archive, a trade secret jealously guarded for over a century, but fully disclosed in the second half of the last century by two American paleontologists (fossil hunters), Professor Stephen Gould of Harvard and Professor Niles Eldredge of Columbia University.

The following is a quote from professor Eldredge's book Reinventing Darwin:

We provided the empirical proof that, contrary to the time-honored picture of gradual evolutionary change, most species virtually cease to change once they end up in the fossil archive. This is a phenomenon that we called "stagnation." We pointed out that Darwinism clings to the myth of gradual change and transformation, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Although hidden from public view this by itself is the final blow for Darwinism. An analogy would be an econometric theory (mathematical construct) predicting exclusively a slow, gradual, and constant growth of the economy. When in real life periods of "stagnation" or, worse, recession or wild swings are found, the theory would be consigned to the wastebasket. The Cambrian explosion exploded neo-Darwinism, hence "Darwinism." Is Darwinism discredited by the fact that the curve of evolution is not a smoothly rising curve as the theory demands, but abruptly rising, followed by long flat stretches? To paraphrase Edward Gibbon: "Yes, for those who think; no, for those who believe."
Conclusion

Since the stagnation in the evolution of species over millions of years during the Cambrian period is totally at variance with the predictions of neo-Darwinism, one is, on purely logical grounds, forced to conclude that Darwinism (neo-Darwinism) has been falsified, that is proven to be false.6

The Cambrian explosion: proof of intelligent design, God?

To gain a better perspective, let's take a seat in H.G. Wells's Time Machine and travel back in time some four billion years. According to scientists, that was when the first (invisible) life
on earth began. Armed with only the naked eye, we then move forward in time, enjoying the view of the desolate landscape and longing for a martini by the fireside.

The first 3,400 million years we don't see anything of live: a Martian landscape, although the earth and the seas are teeming with bacteria and other single-celled life forms. The very moment our "time capsule" passes the magical boundary of 540 million years (ago), the world explodes with multi-cellular life before our delighted gaze!7

This abrupt transition is called the "Cambrian explosion." Suddenly forty main groups of animals (phyla) are found in the fossil archive.8 After the Cambrian explosion no new phyla appear. Ariel Roth rightly points out in his book Origin: "This sudden appearance of all these animal groups (phyla) constitutes a problem for any model predicting a sustained, gradual process"—a polite way to say that Darwinism fails completely to deliver.

The Cambrian period, the Cambrian in short, covers a period between 570 to 500 million years ago. Geologically a brief period, merely 2% since the first life on earth. Each time a new animal species arose in the Cambrian, it happened with lightning speed, within 5,000 to 50,000 years, according to the best estimates. According to Darwin, millions of years are required to produce new species or phyla. "Nature makes no leap" ("Natura non facit saltum") is Darwin's oft repeated mantra. In terms of neo-Darwinism: not only is the stagnation of species over millions of years inexplicable; the abrupt emergence of new life forms in the Cambrian is completely contrary to the theory.

But as I mentioned before, neo-Darwinism is still alive and kicking thanks to its unique ability to adapt itself like a contortionist or chameleon to the most "impossible" facts and situations. To illustrate: at a seminar in Harvard, the famous Darwinist Ernst Mayr was cornered by the strength of his opponents' arguments. Did he admit the theory was false? No way! He extracted himself brilliantly by flatly declaring: "Darwinism is not a theory, it is an ongoing program." What a laugh.

The fact that the Cambrian "Big Bang" rocked the very foundation of Darwinism is dramatically reflected in an editorial of the prestigious science journal Science under the headline "Did Darwin get it right?"9

This critical analysis referred to the results of palaeontological studies in Harvard and Cambridge of 80,000 specimens from the Cambrian that were discovered near the Burgess Pass in Canada by Charles Walcott at the beginning of the twentieth century, but had been stashed away and forgotten in the drawers of Smithsonian Institute until the '70s. When in the '80s. Professor Gould and his co-workers "re-discovered" the Walcott fossils, their findings sounded the death knell of Darwinism as a scientific hypothesis. Darwinism requires a period of at least 100 million years for the evolution of the microscopically small organisms extant before the Cambrian (the pre-Cambrian) to the start of primitive multi-cellular life forms, such as crustaceans, etc. The Cambrian explosion happened within 50,000 years.

In light of the mounting evidence that the classical concept of evolution is flawed, the journal Science featured a peer-reviewed report titled "Did Darwin Get It All Right?" In that article we learn, "The most thorough study of species formation in the fossil record confirms that new species appear with a most un-Darwinian abruptness." The burst of multi-cellular life at the start of the Cambrian, 530 million years ago, was so dramatic that the New York Times10 reported on it under the page-wide, 2 cm high headline:
"Spectacular Fossils Record Early Riot of Creation"

Dr. Jan Bergstrom, the paleontologist cited by the Times, suggested that for new morphologies to have developed this rapidly, "you could have the formation of an entirely new type of animal within thousands of years."

Is this the death blow for Darwinism, which requires 100–200 million years for the formation of new species, let alone higher taxonomic ranks? In fact it is, but even more lethal is the fact that in a single "Big Bang" all fundamental body plans—phyla—were created as if by magic. Why is this disastrous for Darwinism? Not only because Darwinism (neo-Darwinism) demands millions of years for a new species, but chiefly because the process of evolution (according to Darwin) is represented by a tree with its many branches and branching. In the only figure in On the Origin of Species, this branching process is presented in a diagram. But the Cambrian fossils tell a totally different story. The fundamental body plans—phyla—did not arise by Darwinian branches over hundreds of millions of years, but all within—in geologic terms—the wink of an eye. Evolution does not have the shape of a tree but of a shrub, a plant characterized by a stem dividing off the ground in sturdy branches. The ground is the start of the Cambrian. The branches are the main groupings of animals, the phyla. An example of a phylum is the "chordates," that includes us among the "vertebrates."

At the latest count, the number of phyla is 35.11 The "body plans" of at least 34 phyla arose simultaneously 530 million years ago. The core message of Darwinism is "survival of the fittest." In scientific terms even the fittest Darwinist with the greatest adaptability can't survive the Cambrian explosion, except by sticking his head into the sand. In the political arena—both inside academia and outside, fighting the battle for "hearts and minds"—Darwinism is of course in blooming health. So what/who caused the Cambrian explosion? God? The act of creation 530 million years ago? No way! The jump is unjustified. Let's take a closer look, but for the sake of brevity, in the "question and answer" format.

Q. Is the fossil archive of the Cambrian explosion restricted to the Burgess Pass fossils found by Walcott in 1909?

A. No, the fossil evidence of the Cambrian explosion has been found all over the world, for instance in southern China, Greenland, Sweden, Africa, and western Canada.

Q. Does the Cambrian explosion mean that at one stroke organisms equipped with joints, backbones, gills, eyes with perfect lenses, etc., appeared on our planet?

A. Yes, that was indeed the case. All body designs—body plans—of the present main groupings (at least 34) of animals arose in a "flash" 530 million years ago. Of course, they were, compared to present animals, quite primitive, just like the first cars, airplanes, and computers were from our modern perspective.

Q. So, at one stroke fishes, insects, mammals?

A. No, the situation is a bit different and for the layman almost absurd. For instance mammals do not constitute a main group—phylum—but are a subdivision of the vertebrates, a grouping that includes fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. To confuse you even further: vertebrates fall, together with some lesser known animals, under the phylum chordata. Why? What do they have in common? The presence during fetal development or during life of a notochord, which is best described as a rudimentary backbone. So, mammals fall under vertebrates, which form a subdivision of the phylum—main grouping—chordata. During the Cambrian explosion, the first primitive chordates, creatures looking like worms, came into existence.12

The Darwinian model would require billions (not millions) of years to accomplish this. If we represent the four billion years from the first living cell—the primeval cell—to the present as a clock time from midnight till noon (twelve hours), then the origin of the present 34 phyla occurred in seconds. A telling picture of the mystery of the Cambrian explosion is this fictitious analogy: The great innovations of our era took place between 1850 and 1950, a period of one hundred years. The analogy with the Cambrian explosion would be that within one month, say January, 1935, all the inventions happened simultaneously: the train, the automobile, the submarine, the motorcycle, the tractor, the rocket, the tank, etc. Just like the design of Airbus 380 was already—in principle—realized by the Wright brothers, so the blueprints of present vertebrates, from the hare to the orangutan and man were already present in the primitive fishes of the Cambrian.13

Q. Is there an explanation for the simultaneous creation of the 30-odd body plans (phyla) of all current animals in the Cambrian?

Here the Darwinian theory (neo-Darwinism) breaks down completely. In fact it is—as I noted before—the death blow to Darwinism. There are a number of hypotheses to account for the Cambrian explosion. I'll mention three:

In the beginning of the earth's history, the oxygen level in the atmosphere was very low. As a result of all kinds of complex processes, such as glacial periods, tectonic shifts and the proliferation of algae, the oxygen level rose sufficiently to make respiration of complex animals possible. This is an interesting theory that explains little. Besides, its weakest point is that, according to recent findings, long before the Cambrian explosion, the oxygen level was already sufficiently high to sustain complex animals (higher multi-celled organisms).
The theory of "set-aside cells" posits that "separated" cells in the primitive pre-Cambrian fauna contained potentially all possibilities for the formation of complex bodies.14 If you repeat this mantra with sufficient gravitas, everybody will believe it in the end.
The "by one self embryo" theory of Gabor (see appendix).

The initial estimate of the biological "Big Bang" period of thirty million years turned out to be wrong. The Cambrian explosion had come about in only five to ten million years. This was shown by a Harvard study in co-operation with Russian geologists that was published in the journal Science in 1993, tellingly titled "Evolution's Big Bang Gets Even More Explosive" (Science 261:1274, 1993). Professor Gould comments: "The entire Cambrian explosion, previously allowed 30–40 million years, must now fit into 5–10 million years and almost surely nearer the lower limit. n other words, much faster than we thought." How cruel to kick a dead horse twice over!
Our ignorance about the most important event in evolution

The following quotes are from statements by prominent evolutionary biologists in the specialist literature.

"The explosive evolution during the Cambrian … one of the most enigmatic episodes in the history of life."
D. BRIGGS, D. ERWIN, AND F. COLLIER (1994)

"Why was there a radiation [this concept includes the formation of new body plans] in the Cambrian? Our most sincere answer is we do not know."
J. BERGSTRÖM (1993)

Indeed, the honest answer is "We biologists have no idea." But just as nature abhors a vacuum, as the expression goes, so bio-scientists absolutely hate the vacuum of ignorance. The hole must be filled. With what? As behooves a vacuum, with air. Hot air, which is not difficult for an event that happened millions of years ago. We can keep the discussion short by presenting two quotes from the authoritative 600-page work titled On the Origin of Phyla by James Valentine (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Under the heading "There Is a Vast Range of Hypotheses that Attempt to Explain the Cambrian Explosion," the author devotes many pages to a number of theories and concludes the discussion with: "Clearly, there is no shortage of hypotheses to explain the early Cambrian fossil record."

This offers me the opportunity to—semi-seriously—add another one: this "second creation" (the "first creation" was the formation of the first living cell, the primeval cell, see chapter 32) is the creative act of a higher intelligence, God, gods, angels, extraterrestrials (or unknown entities). No matter. The essence of this "crazy" hypothesis is that mind or spirit possesses the ability to create new life forms. But a hypothesis must be substantiated; otherwise, it's just an empty slogan. So, again fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride into the unknown.
Can the mind create new species?

As I've done before in this book, my argument rests on the extrapolation of empirical findings, facts. I'm going to show you that the world-famous American geneticist, Luther Burbank, was able to create new plant species and varieties simply by his mind. "Ah, by talking to trees, like princess Irene [Queen Beatrix's maverick sister]?" Yes, by talking to plants, but except for Burbank no one has ever succeeded in creating new varieties or new species by mere talking. "My foot!" I can hear you say. So I must come up with a credible story. If man is able to create new life forms by the influence of his mind, then it must be a piece of cake for a higher intelligence—God?—to do likewise. Let's get going.
Luther Burbank (1846–1926)

Google presents over 100,000 pages. He must be a man of importance, since he died such a long time ago. Indeed he is. This great inventor (he developed more than eight hundred new plant species and varieties) was admitted sixty years after his death to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, in the distinguished company of Edison, Henry Ford, Damadian, the inventor of MRI, and Parkinson, the inventor of GPS. In 1871 he saved the Irish nation from famine by developing the Burbank potato, which was resistant to potato rot. To conclude: the article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica begins as follows:

Plant breeder whose prodigious production of useful varieties of fruits, flowers, vegetables, grains and grasses, including the Burbank potato, encouraged the development and plant breeding into a modern science that has led to valuable assistance to genetics.

No fuzzy dreamer then, but a man of action? No, both.

In chapter 15, I put the Indian saint and yogi Yogananda on the scene and cited some passages from his famous book Autobiography of a Yogi in connection with the theme "materializations." The following passage is taken from chapter 38 of his work, entitled Luther Burbank, a Saint among the Roses.

"The secret of breeding improved plant species is not only based on scientific knowledge, but especially on love." Luther spoke these wise words, as I walked beside him in his garden in Santa Rosa [California]. We stopped at a bed of edible cactuses.

"When I was experimenting on breeding thornless cactuses," he continued, "I often talked to the plants to induce a vibration of love. 'You have nothing to fear,' I used to tell them. 'You don't need thorns for self-defense. I will protect you.' Little by little the useful desert plant appeared in a thornless variety."

This thornless variety is still widely used today as feed, rich in protein. The encyclopedic work The Seven Mysteries of Life by scientist/philosopher Guy Murchie contains the following passage on Burbank:

As for his plants, he not only hand-pollinated them with intuitive skill but would commune with them daily and intimately like a lover, alternately praising, entreating, and tenderly soothing their apprehensions. To persuade one stubbornly prickly species of cactus to quit sprouting its needles, he would gaze on it every morning with loving eyes, whispering mentally: "You have nothing to fear. Relax and trust me. No longer will you need your defensive thorns. I am your friend for always. I love you and will protect you."

For completeness I quote this passage, although it is irrelevant to the God-hypothesis of the Cambrian explosion.

Burbank believed that the vegetable kingdom has so far evolved "more than twenty" senses, most of them naturally having to do with each plant's vital relations with things like the wind, rain, soil, and sunlight, rival neighbors, and pollinating animals. And he is known to have confided to his close friend, Paramahansa Yogananda, shortly before dying at the age of seventy-seven, that he felt sure all plants possessed minds of some sort, much simpler than the human mind but in essence the same.

Perhaps this view is based on Burbank's remarkable psychic powers. In a magazine article he disclosed, "I inherited my mother's psychic abilities and so did one of my sisters, Emma. I seldom use the telephone to talk to my sister Emma. We just communicate telepathically."
Extrapolation and speculation

If man (be it only one person) is able to produce new species by the direct influence of his mind, why would God, the cosmic mind, not be able to create the main groupings—the phyla—the key problem of the Cambrian explosion, for which science has no sensible explanation whatsoever? "Because God is (supposed to be) spirit, but spirit (mind) cannot exist apart from the brain," is the standard answer. In the previous chapters, the opposite has been demonstrated (paranormal facts and events) in line with Cartesian dualism (mind and matter are two separate "substances") that the mind (spirit) exists independently of the body (brain). For you and me that is a foregone conclusion, since without this duality there is no "life after death," no NDE, while subjects like God and religion would be nonsensical. I would be busy with fantasies, and you would be a gullible simpleton just buying this book.

How could mind (God, Luther Burbank, or, say, the spirits of the deceased scientists or "angels") conceivably guide the process of evolution? No one can answer this question, but an interesting hypothesis has been independently suggested by a number of scientists that gives a measure of respectability to this far-out notion. The core concept is "resonance." Historically it is of some interest to mention that the famous British biologist professor J.B.S. Haldane, committed atheist and communist as well as co-inventor of neo-Darwinism (see earlier in this book), expressed his conviction that the mind was what he called a "resonance phenomenon." Although admittedly this was outside the province of science, he believed that the electric signals in brain cells were produced by "tuning in on some unknown source." Of course, a less circumspect individual, like me, would call this "unknown source" the (immaterial) mind. But as this illustrates, speculation on "resonance" is a respectful pursuit with regard to the mysterious interaction between mind and matter.

Since the following passage is—for the sake of brevity—rather obscure, the reader can safely skip it. Its message is that mind (God's, Luther Burbank; etc.) may—in principle—directly influence evolution by "resonance" with DNA. The Oxford trained physicists David Ash and Peter Hewitt proposed a resonance mechanism whereby "higher intelligences" (God, angels, etc.) could guide evolution by resonance between what is called the super-energy field and DNA. The nature of this (theoretical) field cannot be discussed here, and the diligent reader is referred to the accessible explanation in their book Science of the Gods (Gateway Books, 1990). The following remarks are sign posts:

Resonance. If you strike a tuning-fork near a piano, only the strings tuned to the same pitch will vibrate. This is resonance. By resonance, energy is transferred from the tuning fork to the piano string by which the vibration is produced.

Radio is based on the same principle. A radio contains a tuned coil that resonates to radio waves. These excited vibrations are amplified and converted into sound.

DNA's double helix is tightly coiled, a bit like a telephone cord, and so functions as a coil similar to that in a radio or TV set, or—to use a more sophisticated analogy—an Intel Pentium 4-processor in your computer. In the Ash-Hewitt model, the DNA, acting like a resonating coil, can receive vibrations (waves) from their "super-energy field." In this way DNA would be able to bridge the gap between the super-physical world (God, mind, etc.) and the natural world. Of course the "program" being transferred is not music or video. It is similar to a computer program, a "set of instructions," which Ash and Hewitt call a "Life-program."15

The theorists conclude:

These concepts point to a mechanism whereby intelligence could guide evolution. The key lies in the new role ascribed to DNA. A change in the Life-program could modify the chemical structure of DNA and so alter the genetic codes. These design changes would appear in the offspring. In this way the Life-program could be used to control evolution.

Nothing special really; just genetic engineering from above, of the Luther Burbank variety, mind you.
Conclusion

The view that God or another "higher intelligence" underlies the miracle of the Cambrian explosion is absurd. But it is logically less absurd than the least absurd of the biological speculations masquerading as theories, such as the "theory" of "reserved cells" in the primitive multi-celled organisms of the pre-Cambrian. Do I believe in God's guiding hand during the biological Big Bang? It is safest to say: "The origin of the Cambrian explosion is 'unknowable.'"

What did the godfather of all Darwinists, Charles Darwin himself, think about the idea that all of evolution is but a matter of blind chance and that there can be no question of the guiding hand of a "higher intelligence"? This is his view expressed in his own words:

I am fully aware of the enormous problem, or rather, of the impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man, as the outcome of blind chance. When I reflect on this I feel compelled to assume a First Cause, endowed with intelligence and deserve to be called a Theist.16

Charles Darwin was a theist. His pit bull, Richard Dawkins is an atheist. Who is the wiser one, the dog or his master? After the tragic death of his beloved daughter Anne Elizabeth (Annie) in 1851, Darwin was no longer a Christian believing in a beneficent God, and his "bulldog," Thomas Huxley, a confirmed atheist and materialist and the spokesman for the reticent Darwin, perpetuated the myth that Darwin himself was an atheist, as the above quote disproves.

That "intelligence" can guide the process of "variation and selection" we know from the breeds of dog created by human intelligence, all deriving from the wolf.17But nature itself is able to guide the blind mechanism of random mutations without the aid of "intelligence." The modern theory of "facilitated variation," developed by M.W. Kirschner, professor of Systems Biology at Harvard,18is just one of a number of theories that have been proposed in recent years to fill in the enormous blank spots on the map of "Darwinism," in line with the conclusion of the theory of probability that the perfection found in nature could never have resulted from blind chance alone.
God and the Cambrian explosion

In the influential book Debating Design, published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press (2004), in which a number of prominent scientists debate evolution, Darwin, and design, professor Stephen C. Meyer argues in his contribution The Cambrian Explosion: Evidence for Intelligent Design that the hypothesis "God" is the most logical and biologically sound explanation for the Cambrian explosion. The following quote is taken from the editorial introduction:

The philosopher of biology Stephen C. Meyer argues for design on the basis of the Cambrian explosion—the geologically sudden appearance of new animal body plans during the Cambrian period. Meyer notes that this episode in the history of life represents a dramatic and discontinuous increase in the complex specified information (or specified complexity, a mathematical concept) of the biological world. He argues that neither the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations nor alternative self-organizational mechanisms are sufficient to produce such an increase in information in the time allowed by the fossil evidence. Instead, he suggests that such discrete increases in complex specified information are invariably associated with conscious and rational activity-that is, with design. Thus, he argues that design can be inferred as the best, most causally adequate explanation of what he calls the Cambrian Information Explosion.

Neo-Darwinism is wrong, Darwinism "ain't"

What does this cryptic statement mean? The term Darwinism is often used loosely, even by scientists. Here Darwinism is simply used as an expression of "common descent." Neo-Darwinism, the crux of Darwin's theory, is, however, dead wrong, as I argued above. Let me elaborate. As discussed above the prediction of neo-Darwinism, that the evolution of species is a gradual and continuous process is completely at variance with paleontological findings. So, neo-Darwinism is dead wrong. This, however, does not imply that all of Darwin's theories were (are) wrong. On the contrary, the more molecular biology advances, the more scientists are becoming convinced of the truth of Darwin's dangerous idea: common descent.

Darwin envisioned the following scenario:

All living species derive from a single ancestor: the primordial cell.

Variation within species is a matter of chance.

Survival of an organism depends on the ability to adapt to the environment. Darwin called this selection. Selection is in fact nothing but making sure that you do not die in childhood (just check how many of your ancestors succumbed in infancy) and that you find a partner to pass on your DNA (coïtusual selection).

For our theme the concept of variation is central. The modern definition of this term is:

There must be a great variety of different traits in the population, and there must exist a mechanism to introduce new variation into the population.

Let me give a playful example. In the world population noses of very different shapes and sizes are found. A new "variety" could arise when a "classical Jew" would mate with an aboriginal. But this is trivial. The mechanism the definition refers to is the process of random mutations in the DNA of the individual. Mutations are nothing but (permanent) changes in the DNA, the blueprint of life. Nearly always these are "errors" like spelling errors during the copying of a text. Most mutations occur during cell division, "spontaneously," or from hard radiation, like cosmic rays to which we are constantly exposed. Mutations, if not directly repaired by the cell, are nearly always either "neutral" or deleterious. Only very rarely does a mutation have a beneficial effect. Such rare mutations constitute—at least in theory—the engine of evolution and the creation of new species. It is essential, however, that the mutations occur in the germ cells, since only the DNA of the germ cells is transmitted to the next generation. If you—gutless bastard—should get a mutation in your pituitary gland turning you into superman by the increased output of growth hormone and testosterone, it would have no influence whatsoever on your offspring. The mutation must be present in your sperm cells; otherwise, it is evolutionary irrelevant.
Variation and selection

Darwinism in its broadest sense refers to both "common origin" and "variation and selection." On the basis of comparative studies of the genomes (DNA) of the most diverse animal species (among which are man, mouse, and fish), there is little doubt about the correctness of evolution and the Darwinian principle of variation and selection. This conclusion is succinctly put by Professor Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome project that mapped human DNA, in his book The Language of God—A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Collins concludes in the chapter "Deciphering God's Instruction Book":

The examples reported here from the study of genomes, plus others that could fill hundreds of books, provide the kind of molecular support for the theory of evolution that has convinced all working biologists that Darwin's framework of variation and natural selection is unquestionably correct.

Is this incompatible with God and religion? Not at all. Professor Collins, a Christian (without a Christian background) summarizes this theistic world view, which he calls "theistic evolution," as follows:

God, who is not limited in space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants and animals of all sorts.

Let me end this section by citing the following passage from the end of the highly influential book Evolution: a Theory in Crisis, by the molecular biologist Michael Denton, about the extreme improbability that the perfection in nature has arisen by pure chance.

It is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates against the idea of chance. Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which—a functional protein or a gene—is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy. We feel humbled, as Neolithic man would in the presence of twentieth-century technology.

It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design.

In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate. The credibility of natural selection is weakened, therefore, not only by the perfection we have already glimpsed but by the expectation of further as yet undreamt of depths of ingenuity and complexity. To those who dogmatically advocate that all this new reality is the result of pure chance one can only reply, like Alice, incredulous in the face of the contradictory logic of the Red Queen:

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the queen. "When I was your age I did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

An illustration

The following example has been taken from the book Modern Science and the Bible by Ben Hobrink (Gideon, 2005). It impressively illustrates some of the problems of Darwinism and evolution.

One of the thousands of examples is the bombardier beetle (Brachymus crepitans), that is found all over the world along streams and pools. When the bombardier beetle is attacked by an enemy, it aims two tiny tubes in his tail at the attacker; a teeny explosion, then a shot rings out. A scalding, caustic fluid shoots outward causing painful scalds. If the enemy is not hit, the fluid dissolves in a bluish smoke. The smoke screen not only serves to cover the retreat, but has a stinging effect, causing the enemy to take flight.

The beetle has two sets of glands producing liquids. Together these liquids form a highly concentrated mixture of 10% hydroquinone and 28% hydrogen peroxide. The mixture is stored in a collecting sac and is squeezed into a real combustion chamber in case of danger. There a catalyst is added to the mixture resulting in an explosion which drives the fluid outwards. Just like a liquid fuel rocket. The boiling hot liquid shoots outwards and is directed towards the enemy by movable nozzles.

Just imagine that such a system would have to be produced by random changes (mutations) and natural selection. For that the beetle must not only develop the complete apparatus of glands, muscles, collecting sac, combustion chamber, and nozzles, but the whole system must work instantly in perfect synchrony and contain three highly concentrated substances: hydroquinone, hydrogen peroxide and the catalyst. To produce these substances at the right spot and at the right quantities requires complex chemical reactions. The beetle should be able to mix the materials at the right spot and at the right time, otherwise it will blow itself up. If this whole complex apparatus would have come into being by random changes, millions of beetle generations would have been subjected to mass "suicides." The intervening developmental stages would have been highly perilous for the continued existence of the beetle. A credible scenario? It's mind-blowing, to put it mildly.

Darwinism: a pseudo-science

In retrospect, Darwin's theory on the mechanism of the origin of species (1880) is completely at variance with the solid facts of genetics that were published by Gregor Mendel as early as 1866.
The problem is concisely stated by professor Lynn Margulis (more about this eminent scientist below) in the following passage:

Darwin proclaimed that populations of organisms change gradually in the course of time as their members are being depleted, which is the point of departure of his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Mendel, who developed the rules of hereditary characters that are transmitted from one generation to the next, showed that—although a reshuffle of these characters takes place—they do not change in the course of time.

A white flower cross-fertilized with a red flower has a pink offspring and when that pink flower is cross-fertilized with another pink flower the result is just as red, as white or as pink as the original grandparent or parent. On the basis of his experiments Mendel drew the conclusion that species do not change in time, so remain constant. The "mixing" producing the pink color is superficial. The genes are simply shuffled to reappear in different combinations, but those same combinations generate exactly the same types. Mendel's observations are established truths.

So it is clear that Darwin's theoretical model was completely at variance with the biological facts. However, this came only to light at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries had rediscovered Mendel's laws that had fallen into oblivion. This rediscovery caused an enormous commotion in the ranks of the (predominantly) Anglo-Saxon "Darwinists," to whom The Origin of Species was their Bible and Darwin their Messiah. The crucial question was: "How does one stick together two pieces that are irreconcilable?" Common sense tells us that this is impossible. But the ingenuity of the biologist J.B.S. Haldane (see earlier in this book) brought a brilliant solution, ever since known under the term "neo-Darwinism."19

Margulis continues:

To join two incompatible views, that is Darwin's evolutionary view and Mendel's pragmatic anti-evolutionary concept, J.B.S. Haldane, without doubt a brilliant man, and R.A. Fisher, a mathematician, generated a whole school of English-speaking evolutionists when they developed the neo-Darwinian population-genetics theory.

To rationalize both fields they invented in the years between 1920 and 1950 a language of population genetics that was called neo-Darwinism. They mathematized their work in the belief of being able to spread this term far and wide in Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. France and other countries rejected neo-Darwinism, but Japanese and other researchers took part in attempts to explain neo-Darwinism.

It's time to say a word or two about professor Lynn Margulis, one of the fiercest academic critics of neo-Darwinism (popular term: Darwinism). What is the scientific status of Margulis? Margulis can be counted as one of the greatest evolution biologists of our time. Her field—the evolution of single-celled organisms—covers a period of three and a half billion years, three billion years longer that that of the traditional Darwinists who deal with multi-celled organisms. As Margulis notes: "Darwinists show an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interests to animals."

As we all know, animals and plants (multi-celled organisms) are composed of cells. The cell is the unit of life. To offer you a glimpse of the extraordinary scientific achievements of professor Margulis, I will present two examples that have a direct bearing on both of us. As early as 1967,20 Margulis proposed a theory—which was later verified empirically—that the "skeleton" of our body cells, the so-called cyto-skeleton, which is essential for the shape of the cell, cell division, and many cell functions, is actually the legacy of a marriage that took place three billion years ago. A bacterium (so-called prokaryote, because it lacks a nucleus) that did not possess a cyto-skeleton began living together (they call it "symbiosis") with a spirochete (a modern example is the cause of syphilis), that did possess one, which, by the way, enabled it to swim. From this symbiosis of these two entirely different organisms that eventually fused together, emerged the cell of multi-organisms, the cell of you and me, characterized by a cell nucleus and a cyto-skeleton, the so-called eukaryotic cell.

Margulis could also prove that the energy batteries in our cells (each one of them contains hundreds of these tiny particles) are the descendants of a symbiosis between a kind of bacterium living without oxygen (so-called anaerobic) and an oxygen-dependent cousin (aerobic). This explains why the batteries in our cells, the mitochondria, that are really the descendants of the oxygen breathing bacteria (aerobic), contain their own DNA, while every schoolboy knows that our familiar DNA is stored in the cell nucleus. Our cells, the building blocks of multi-celled evolution, arose billions of years ago by the fusion of divergent bacterium-like organisms exchanging their DNA. This process, called horizontal gene transfer, plays a central role in evolution, but is, for understandable reasons, simply ignored by inspired Darwinists. The "hard scientists," the molecular biologists, take a different view. The molecular biologist Peter Gogarten calls it, "A new paradigm for biology."

The genius behind this new paradigm (direction of thought) is professor Lynn Margulis. In 1999 Margulis received the National Medal of Science, the highest American award for scientific accomplishments. Among the different critics of Darwinism, from creationists to proponents of Intelligent Design, Margulis stands apart as unchallenged authority in the field of evolution. As I said earlier, evolution as "fact" stands apart from Darwin or Darwinism. Already Kant and later Lamarck posited the evolution scenario. Darwinism deals with the mechanism of the origin of species: "blind chance" according to Darwin.

The most influential proponent of (neo)Darwinism, Richard Dawkins, Darwin's pit bull who usually snarls at his critics, has this to say about Margulis and her work: "This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it."21

Before proceeding, let me cite the following personal observation made by Margulis:

For many years I've been critical of mathematical neo-Darwinism. It never made much sense to me. We are told that random mutations—most of which are harmful—are the main cause of evolutionary change. I remember waking up one morning with the revealing thought: "I'm not a neo-Darwinist!"

As we're on the subject of personal anecdotes, let me add another one: when as a much younger man I was working as a visiting lecturer at the division of mathematical biology at Harvard, I gave a lecture on the Haldane-Fisher mathematical model (see earlier in this book) for a MIT working group of biochemists and mathematicians. As a confirmed neo-Darwinist (Fisher was my hero) I was confident of success. The criticism turned out to be devastating; the model proved to be full of holes, like Swiss holey cheese. At the end of the seminar I was a mental wreck but permanently cured.22

After presenting the credentials of Dr. Margulis, the moment has arrived to listen to her opinion of Darwin's theory, neo-Darwinism.

But first a short explanation of the term Margulis used—phrenology—is in order. Phrenology is a theory that asserts that the character of a person can be read from the shape of his head (bumps, etc.). It is based on the premise that the mental faculties are localized in separate areas of the brain (e.g., a diligent person may have a bump at his temple). Later the theory was further developed by Professor Lombroso (yes, of the Lombroso type).23 As it was firmly believed that mental qualities were located in different parts of the brain, the theory was very popular until the beginning of the twentieth century, despite the fact that Magendie branded it as pseudo-science as early as 1843.

Back to the present. Margulis's judgment of neo-Darwinism is as plain as day. In the work The Third Culture (ed. J. Brockman, Simon & Schuster, 1995) written by scientists for scientists, Margulis writes: "The neo-Darwinist tradition reminds one of phrenology and it is the kind of science that can expect to meet with the same fate. With hindsight it will appear ridiculous, because it is ridiculous."

Margulis does not base her opinion solely on the incorrect mathematical model. Just as absurd in her judgment is the assumption that evolution is determined by random mutations ("errors" in the text of DNA). Margulis notes: "Everyone knows that when fruit flies are exposed to X-rays or other mutagens it results in dead or sick flies. No new species or flies arise from it—there is the rub."24
Notes

Moorehead, P. and M. Kaplan in Proceedings of the Symposium, Wistar Institute of Biology, 1967.

Gould. S, Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge.

Of course a change in "timing" involves an intervention in Newton's mechanics.

Cronin, T.M. and C.E. Scheiner, Trends in Evolutionairy Biology and Ecology, 5, 275, 1990.

In the sixth edition of his famous book, Darwin admitted the tendency of species to remain unchanged in the fossil archive. However, as professor Eldredge notes in his book Reinventing Darwin: "Darwin vastly preferred his original picture of gradual, even progressive change."

Gould and Eldredge found in the fossil archive that the (extinct) trilobites had not undergone any changes ("stagnation") in the course of sixty million years. The mutations are due to cosmic radiation, a constant factor. Sixty million years of mutations and no "evolution." Oops!

Beautifully described in Stephen Gould's book Wonderful Life (1989).

According to estimates, the total weight of all organisms that have lived on earth since the Cambrium era is equal to the weight (mass) of the earth. Unimaginable! Only a miniscule fraction of the prehistoric organisms has been preserved as fossils. Most derive from marine animals. The earliest organisms of the Cambrium explosion are small—of the order of millimeters. For the inquisitive reader, I'll just pick at random from Wonderful Life (S. Gould): Gastropoda, Pelecypoda, Branchiopoda, Trilobita, Homalozoa etc..

Kerr, R., Science, 267, 1421, 1995.

Wilford, J., New York Times, 23 April 1991, p. C-1.

We should say: "More than thirty." The estimates range from 34 to 37, and just recently a new phylum has been discovered at great depth on the seabed.

See for example Richard Southwood, The Story of Life, p. 59, Oxford University Press, 2003.

It concerns the fish fossils in early Cambrian rocks at Haikou in China, near the classic Chengjiang location.

Knoll, A.H., Breathing room for early animals, Nature 382, 111, 1996.
Quote: "Still another idea is that the evolutionary invention of set-aside cells, cells sequestered in simple ancestral lineages that could be used in the differentiation of complex bodies."

There are a number of related theories. For instance, the computer scientist Simon Y. Berkovich regards the so-called junk DNA that makes up 95% of the genome, as the gateway to information stored in the non-local space. [Such as mand, J.G.D.] Berkovich, S.Y., On the "Barcode" Functionality of DNA, or the Phenomenon of Life in the Physical Universe , Dorrance Publishing Co. Inc., 2003

C.R. Darwin, cited by K.T. Miller in Finding Darwin's God, Harper Collins, 1977, 287

A thought experiment. If a Darwinist from another planet would be visiting the earth he would never suspect that behind all the different breeds if dogs an intelligence is hidden: the breeder. His explanation for the origin of these breeds would be pure Darwinian: chance and natural selection.

Kirschner, M.W. and J.C. Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life, Resolving Darwin's Dilemma, Yale University Press, 2005.

Later developments of this theory based on quicksand are joined under the umbrella The New Synthesis.

Sagan-Margulis, L., J. Theor. Biol, 14, 255, 1967. At the time Margulis was still married to the famous astronomer Carl Sagan.

It concerns Margulis's so-called endosymbiosis theory. See John Brockman (ed), The Third Culture, Touchstone, 1995, 144. The vast difference in the scientific level between Margulis and Dawkins finds expression in the number of quotations of their technical papers cited in Science Citation Index (SCI). For example, Einstein's most cited paper occurs 600 times in SCI and Einstein's total "score" is 10,000. The SCI-score is a good measure for the importance of a scientist. The score of Margulis is 3300, that of Dawkins 1! (in 2008). Margulis is a top scientist, Dawkins an "educator" and "science writer."

One problem is the absence of the mapping between the genotype and the phenotype space. One pretends that this mapping is known. However, this is only the case when, like in sickle-cell anaemia, the phenotype is "one-to-one" with the genotype, or, if the time-interval is brief. In general the "constants" (parameters) are not constant, but (unknown) functions of the state variables in the other domain. I was challenged on this issue and rightly so. The Haldane-Fisher "population genetics" model is—superficially—impressive, but does not connect with biological reality. Recommended introduction: David Plaisted, Population Genetics Made Simple.

Cesare Lombroso, Scientific Phrenology, 1902.

She continues: "Everyone agrees that such mutagens produce inherited variation. Everyone agrees that natural selection acts on this variation. The question is, from where comes the useful variation upon which selection acts? This problem has not been solved." Contrary to other critics of neo-Darwinism, such as adherents of Intelligent Design, Margulis presents a plausible alternative: endosymbiosis, the fusion of two or more genera via symbiosis. In 1997 this hypothesis received strong support from the discovery by Woese and Olson that archaea are genetically closer related to humans than to bacteria. This holds both for the proteins as well as the genes, which both contain large sections of non-coding DNA.

Appendix

The rapid formation of all thirty-five phyla during the Cambrian explosion remains unexplained. Each phylum has its own embryonic body plan, in which nothing has been changed during the subsequent evolution. The physicist Gabor Forgacs and evolutionary biologist Gerd Müller provide an astonishing solution in their book Biological Physics of the Developing Embryo (Cambridge University Press, 2005), summarized in their statement:

The formation of the animal kingdom [600–550 million years ago] does not require a long period of genetic evolution. The formation happened without a genetic program. The first embryos possessed only a primitive genetic building plan. Biological physics (diffusion, osmosis, etc.) of the developing embryo (the title of one of Forgacs's books) determined the spatial destinations of cells. Successful embryos only later developed genetic programs to fix their building plans.

Sounds crazy? Expert opinion is divided.

The "Facilitated Variation" theory developed by Marc Kirschner, professor of Systems Biology in Harvard, offers a possible explanation of evolution, including the Cambrian explosion. This theory may be regarded as an alternative to the defunct neo-Darwinism and is presented in the book The Plausibility of Life written by M.W. Kirschner and J.C. Gerhart (Yale University Press, 2005). Perhaps the Cambrian explosion was yet a "natural" process without the intervention of higher powers. Will we ever know?

 

[Silentio]

cliffs?

 

[SubGenius]

Ik heb het echt eerlijk waar allemaal gelezen...

(waar is EricR als je hem nodig hebt )