Royal Society Meeting - Modern Synthesis is Broken

Read a report on the Royal Society Meeting

“The Modern Synthesis, while undoubtedly productive for a time, is a misconception of reality that has reached the limits of its explanatory power. The problems are fundamental. No amount of cosmetic surgery is going correct them.”

“To the contrary, Darwinian competition causes not the evolution of species but the destruction of species.It is collaboration in its various forms that causes biological evolution. Hence I’m surprised by calls for extending the neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Synthesis. You can’t extend something that is broken. Surely what is needed now, after 65 years, is using the empirical evidence to develop a new paradigm for biological evolution.”

"If you want the definition of the Modern Synthesis, take a look at how Neil deGrasse Tyson explains evolution in the 2014 remake of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. Tyson, an astrophysicist, is unaware that he is misinformed, as are most in science, academia, government, literature, the arts, and the public by this outmoded theory of evolution."

“Shuker tried to interrupt but Noble held his ground:
‘No, YOU need to listen. I used to think exactly like you. I embraced the reductionist mindset for years. When I got out of school I was a card-carrying reductionist. Reductionism is powerful and it’s useful. I am not dissing it. Many times we need it. But it is not the whole story.’ Noble described how bacterial regulatory
networks rebuilt those genes in four days by hyper-mutating, actively searching for a solution that would give them tails and enable them to Nind food. Natural selection did not achieve that. Natural genetic engineering did.’”

“It’s appropriate that this meeting is being held at the Royal Society, whose motto, we were reminded yesterday, is “Nullius in verba”: Accept nothing on authority."

“Not one whit of empirical evidence shows that new species arise from the neo-Darwinian mechanism. To the contrary, Darwinian competition causes not the evolution of species but the destruction of species.”

http://www.envevo.org/environmentalevolution.org/Home_files/Jan2017envevo_newsletter.pdf

The death of NeoDarwinism, No Selfish Gene

"The genome... is best described as a database used by organisms to generate the functions that you and I and others study as physiology."

"We inherit much more than DNA"

"The number of possible interactions , the number of possible circuits you could form 25,000 genes is 10^70,000. There wouldn't be enough time over the whole billions of years of the evolution of life on earth for nature to have explored but more than a tiny fraction of those."


On Dawkins and the selfish gene - "He is totally confused."    "He has misused a metaphor"  "He [Dawkins] is philosophically naive and  I am afraid he has misled many people for a very considerable period of  time."  40 minutes in

"There are no good or bad genes"

"There are reasons those genes are there"

"The great majority of people we are talking to were educated in biology 30 or 40 years ago and they really have no idea of the sea change that has occurred."


"the house of cards, the citadel if you like  is empty, but many people still do not know that."  54 min

(more in comments below...)

A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution

Absolutely fantastic talk.  Over 100,000 hits over at UncommonDescent. 

 

A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution

Nanotech and Jesus Christ - James Tour at Georgia Tech 

  

… I will tell you as a scientist and a synthetic chemist: if anybody should be able to understand evolution, it is me, because I make molecules for a living, and I don’t just buy a kit, and mix this and mix this, and get that. I mean, ab initio, I make molecules. I understand how hard it is to make molecules. I understand that if I take Nature’s tool kit, it could be much easier, because all the tools are already there, and I just mix it in the proportions, and I do it under these conditions, but ab initio is very, very hard.
I don’t understand evolution, and I will confess that to you. Is that OK, for me to say, “I don’t understand this”? Is that all right? I know that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t understand anything about organic synthesis, but they understand evolution. I understand a lot about making molecules; I don’t understand evolution. And you would just say that, wow, I must be really unusual.
Let me tell you what goes on in the back rooms of science – with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. I have sat with them, and when I get them alone, not in public – because it’s a scary thing, if you say what I just said – I say, “Do you understand all of this, where all of this came from, and how this happens?” Every time that I have sat with people who are synthetic chemists, who understand this, they go “Uh-uh. Nope.” These people are just so far off, on how to believe this stuff came together. I’ve sat with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes I will say, “Do you understand this?”And if they’re afraid to say “Yes,” they say nothing. They just stare at me, because they can’t sincerely do it.
I was once brought in by the Dean of the Department, many years ago, and he was a chemist. He was kind of concerned about some things. I said, “Let me ask you something. You’re a chemist. Do you understand this? How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? And how do you get a cell membrane without a DNA? And how does all this come together from this piece of jelly?” We have no idea, we have no idea. I said, “Isn’t it interesting that you, the Dean of science, and I, the chemistry professor, can talk about this quietly in your office, but we can’t go out there and talk about this?”
If you understand evolution, I am fine with that. I’m not going to try to change you – not at all. In fact, I wish I had the understanding that you have.
But about seven or eight years ago I posted on my Web site that I don’t understand. And I said, “I will buy lunch for anyone that will sit with me and explain to me evolution, and I won’t argue with you until I don’t understand something – I will ask you to clarify. But you can’t wave by and say, “This enzyme does that.” You’ve got to get down in the details of where molecules are built, for me. Nobody has come forward.
The Atheist Society contacted me. They said that they will buy the lunch, and they challenged the Atheist Society, “Go down to Houston and have lunch with this guy, and talk to him.” Nobody has come! Now remember, because I’m just going to ask, when I stop understanding what you’re talking about, I will ask. So I sincerely want to know. I would like to believe it. But I just can’t.
Now, I understand microevolution, I really do. We do this all the time in the lab. I understand this. But when you have speciation changes, when you have organs changing, when you have to have concerted lines of evolution, all happening in the same place and time – not just one line – concerted lines, all at the same place, all in the same environment … this is very hard to fathom.
I was in Israel not too long ago, talking with a bio-engineer, and [he was] describing to me the ear, and he was studying the different changes in the modulus of the ear, and I said, “How does this come about?” And he says, “Oh, Jim, you know, we all believe in evolution, but we have no idea how it happened.” Now there’s a good Jewish professor for you. I mean, that’s what it is. So that’s where I am. Have I answered the question? (52:00 to 56:44)

 

Experimentally Confirming the Limits to Darwinian Evolution

Over at Evolution News this article dated 1/11/12 shows empirically that the Darwinian process degrades rather than constructing new functional systems.  The article also states " It seems like some notable workers are converging on the idea that the information for life was all present at the beginning, and life diversifies by losing pieces of that information. That concept is quite compatible with intelligent design. Not so much with Darwinism."

So, we have more support for IDvolution.

Evolution of increased complexity in a molecular machine

"The work of Finnegan et al. (2012) strikes me as quite thorough and elegant. I have no reason to doubt that events could have unfolded that way. However, the implications of the work for unguided evolution appear very different to me than they've been spun in media reports. The most glaringly obvious point is that, like the results of Lenski's work, this is evolution by degradation. All of the functional parts of the system were already in place before random mutation began to degrade them. Thus it is of no help to Darwinists, who require a mechanism that will construct new, functional systems. What's more, unlike Lenski's results, the mutated system of Thornton and colleagues is not even advantageous; it is neutral, according to the authors. Perhaps sensing the disappointment for Darwinism in the results, the title of the paper and news reports emphasize that the "complexity" of the system has increased. But increased complexity by itself is no help to life -- rather, life requires functional complexity. One can say, if one wishes, that a congenitally blind man teaming up with a congenitally legless man to safely move around the environment is an increase in "complexity" over a sighted, ambulatory person. But it certainly is no improvement, nor does it give the slightest clue how vision and locomotion arose."

"Finnegan et al.'s (2012) work intersects with several other concepts. First, their work is a perfect example of Michael Lynch's idea of "subfunctionalization," where a gene with several functions duplicates, and each duplicate loses a separate function of the original. (Force et al., 1999) Again, however, the question of how the multiple functions arose in the first place is begged. Second, it intersects somewhat with the recent paper by Austin Hughes (2011) in which he proposes a non-selective mechanism of evolution abbreviated "PRM" (plasticity-relaxation-mutation), where a "plastic" organism able to survive in many environments settles down in one and loses by degradative mutation and drift the primordial plasticity. But again, where did those primordial functions come from? It seems like some notable workers are converging on the idea that the information for life was all present at the beginning, and life diversifies by losing pieces of that information. That concept is quite compatible with intelligent design. Not so much with Darwinism."

Interview WIth Lynn Margulis - natural selection

Natural selection is a conservative process not a creative one.

Discover Interview: Lynn Margulis Says She's Not Controversial, She's Right It's the neo-Darwinists, population geneticists, AIDS researchers, and English-speaking biologists as a whole who have it all wrong.

And you don’t believe natural selection is the answer?
This is the problem I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection. If you want bigger eggs you keep selecting the hens that are laying the bigger eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly eggs. Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.
and…
I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change — led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence. …
There is no gradualism in the fossil record… ‘Punctuated equilibrium’ was invented to describe the discontinuity. …
The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or ‘God did it.’ They have no alternatives that are scientific.
The evolutionary biologists believe the evolutionary pattern is a tree. It’s not. The evolutionary pattern is a web…