Debate with a scientist

[John Human]

Back in December and January, I had a debate with a scientist at a forum for medieval genealogists, where people routinely ridicule the thought of directly communicating with deceased ancestors. (For an explanation of communicating with ancestors, see https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/535187/com ... -ancestors)

Toward the end of December, a “scientist and engineer� appeared and initiated a debate. For the very first time, somebody actually tried to refute me instead of the usual fare of contempt and insults. This self-identified scientist made it very clear that he dismissed my lengthy stories from ancestors as hallucinations, because of his reductionist materialist presupposition that any such communication at a distance, without some sort of physical connection, was impossible.

“Reductionist materialism� is but one solution to the so-called mind-body problem that exercised natural philosophers (“scientists�) in the 17th and 1th centuries. Are mind and body two separate things? If so, which one is primary? An overview of the mind-body problem can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem

Reductionist materialism means that things like astrology or shamanism or channeling or communicating with ancestors get summarily dismissed as “hallucinations� or “superstition.�

The conclusion of the debate (because the scientist made a point of bowing out without offering any counter-argument) came on Jan. 7. Here is the essential part of what I wrote to the scientist:

You made it clear that you consider mind to be an epiphenomenon of neural activity in the brain, and you go on to say: “To me, the mind is a function of a living brain, meaning that they’re not distinct. In my opinion, there can be no mind without some form of complex structure, like a brain.�

In response to your opinion that there can be no mind without some form of complex structure, the obvious question is, why not? I am reminded of the New York Times declaring that a heavier-than-air flying machine was impossible. Your opinion seems to be unscientific, and serves to block skeptical inquiry. It would also seem to be rigidly atheistic (denying the possibility of a transcendent deity), as opposed to a healthy skepticism when approaching questions that appear to be unknowable. Your position regarding belief in witchcraft, denying that it has anything to do with “truth,� also seems to be arbitrarily rigid and unscientific, opposed to a spirit of skeptical inquiry. However, perhaps you wrote hastily and polemically, and perhaps in general you are able to keep an open mind regarding subjects where you are inclined to strongly doubt claims that violate your pre-existing suppositions about reality.

Please keep in mind that, regarding the mind/body problem, there used to be (and still are) several different approaches, as opposed to the mind-numbing reductionist materialist view that is overwhelmingly prevalent today in science departments. Perhaps Leibniz’s approach was the most esoteric, and he was a renowned scientist and mathematician (as well as a philosopher and diplomat). His view was routinely dismissed but never refuted (as far as I am aware), but Leibniz’s influence simply disappeared from universities after protracted tenure battles in the mid-eighteenth century. However, Leibniz’s view isn’t the only possibility. I am intrigued by the thought that both matter and consciousness are manifestations of something underlying, which is not inconsistent with my own view of reality.

It seems to me that reductionist materialism (your stated belief) fails to explain the all-important phenomenon of human creativity, as measured by our ability to reorganize our environment (as a result of scientific discovery and technological progress) to establish a potential population density orders of magnitude above that of a primitive hunter-gatherer society in the same geographical area. (There is an important corollary here: Once a human society exits the Stone Age and begins using metal as a basic part of the production of food and tools, in the long run we must continue to progress or collapse due to resource depletion, especially regarding the need for progressively more efficient sources of energy. And there is another corollary as well: As a society gets more technologically complex, the minimum area for measuring relative potential population density increases.)

Is this human capability explainable in terms of matter reorganizing itself in ever-more-complex fashion? If you answer “yes� to such a question, the subsidiary question is: how does matter organize itself in ever-more-complex ways (such as the creation of human brains that then come up with the technological breakthroughs and social organization to support ever-higher relative potential population densities)? Does random chance work for you as an answer to this question? If so, isn’t that an arbitrary (and therefore unscientific) theological supposition? Or do you see the inherent logic in positing some form of intelligent design (an argument as old as Plato)? If you accept the principle of intelligent design, it seems to me that, to be consistent, the reductionist materialist view would have to posit an immanent (as opposed to transcendent) intelligence, as with the Spinozistic pantheism that influenced Locke’s followers and arguably influenced Locke himself. But if you go in that direction, where is the “universal mind� that is guiding the formation of human brains capable of creative discovery, and how does it communicate with the matter that comprises such brains? The way I see things, both the “deification of random chance� argument and the supposition of an immanent “divine� creative force have insurmountable problems, leaving some sort of transcendent divinity as the default answer regarding the question of the efficient cause of human creativity, with the final cause being the imperative for humans to participate in the ongoing creation of the universe.

The forum thread where this originally appeared is here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... yqswb4d5WA

[Guy Threepwood]

[Replying to post 100 by Waterfall]

That would make sense;

I don't see any good argument, for why God would chose to destroy all the memories we make..

So it is only logical that some of those memories are called upon, at various times and places, where they may serve a particular purpose.

But I don't see any particular purpose, for making this something that can be lab-tested... at least not easily. i.e. we are all on a 'need to know' basis!

[mgb]

The true mystery of human existence is ontology, not matter. The human mind is concerned with a vast ontological universe of mathematics, science, art, literature, religion, music creativity...this is the mystery; what is it?

The materialists have created a false arena wherein they argue that the mystery of human existence can be reduced to materialistic arguments, and many have been blinded by this. Materialism has explained nothing above primitive material truths. Matter is only the packaging, the real issue is mind, consciousness and ontological reality.

[mgb]

The theory of evolution has proven to be correct. And verified in countless ways.

This is untrue. There are huge problems with ToE. https://dissentfromdarwin.org/

A 2011 paper in Biological Theory stated, “Darwinism in its current scientific incarnation has pretty much reached the end of its rope,�9 and in 2012, the noted atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel argued in an Oxford University Press book that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.�10Evolutionary biologist Stanley Salthe likewise describes himself as “a critic of Darwinian evolutionary theory,�11 which he insists “cannot explain origins, or the actual presence of forms and behaviors�12 in organisms. Biologist Scott Gilbert has stated in a report in Nature that “[t]he modern synthesis is remarkably good at modeling the survival of the fittest, but not good at modeling the arrival of the fittest,� and evolutionary paleobiologist Graham Budd admits: “When the public thinks about evolution, they think about the origin of wings and the invasion of the land, . . . ut these are things that evolutionary theory has told us little about.�13 Eugene Koonin writes in Trends in Genetics about the increasingly undeniable reasons to doubt core neo-Darwinian tenets, such as view that “natural selection is the main driving force of evolution,� indicating that “the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair� and “all major tenets of the modern synthesis have been, if not outright overturned, replaced by a new and incomparably more complex vision of the key aspects of evolution.� He concludes: “Not to mince words, the modern synthesis is gone.�14 Because of such criticisms, Cornell evolutionary biologist William Provine believes the Darwinian claim that “Macroevolution was a simple extension of microevolution� is “false.� https://dissentfromdarwin.org/resources ... roversial/

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 103 by mgb]

This is untrue. There are huge problems with ToE.

That statement is untrue (and one person in your list even said ToE should explain origins which of course is false, and demonstrates his lack of understanding of what ToE is). Compare your tiny list of dissenters with the (by far) larger community of scientists worldwide who support ToE. Here are just a few links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_ ... _evolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... ent_design

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation% ... ontroversy

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/bio ... -evolution

What alternative would you present that provides a better explanation for how life diversified on this planet?

[Divine Insight]

The theory of evolution has proven to be correct. And verified in countless ways.

This is untrue. There are huge problems with ToE.

This is a false claim.

Those who complain about ToE have absolutely nothing to offer. All they do is complain about things they are not happy with or don't understand. But they have absolutely no alternative theories to offer to replace ToE.

In fact, the suggestion that some magical God is responsible makes no sense at all. That idea has far more problems that ToE could ever dream of having.

If there was a purposeful God behind all of this, then that purposeful God would be responsible for every genetic mutation and birth defect etc.

In other words, to even propose "Intelligent Design" as the answer requires that the designer who is behind it all is either not very intelligent at all, or he is extremely malicious and evil.

So this idea has no merit. It certainly can't support any "Intelligent Designer" arguments.

So they have absolutely nothing to offer but totally unwarranted complaints. They don't have a "better explanation" to offer.

[mgb]

Compare your tiny list of dissenters with the (by far) larger community of scientists worldwide who support ToE.

ToE has some truth in it but the objections concern Darwinism and highlight the many technical problems with the theory. It is far from proved and has many gaping holes in it. Here are some more; http://www.arn.org/docs/berlinski/db_de ... in0696.htm

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 106 by mgb]

ToE has some truth in it but the objections concern Darwinism and highlight the many technical problems with the theory. It is far from proved and has many gaping holes in it.

Most theories have "holes" to some extent as science is always digging deeper for more details and finer "resolution" on things as new technology and observations come into play. Einstein's Theory of General Relativity has been proven to be correct via many observations and experiments, but it is still being tested at the extremes with new observations of black holes, etc. Some aspects cannot be tested without new technology, and new technology is what allowed the deviations from Newton's formulation of gravity to be observed in the first place and suggest that there was more to it.

This is normal, and ToE is no different. The general concept that natural selection acts on DNA changes (mutations, insertions, deletions, etc.) and allows beneficial changes (in terms of survivability and higher reproduction rates) to spread and become fixed in a population, while deleterious changes do not, has been positively proven to be correct. Speciation is a result of this process over time. Darwin never saw an early Homo fossil (that was known at the time to be from Homo), he had no idea that DNA existed or how heredity worked, what the genetic code was, etc. None of this had been worked out yet, and he knew his early ideas were just a beginning:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science- ... -45637001/

The core principles of ToE have been proven to be correct through extensive observations, and further confirmed by the genetics work of the last 50-60 years. This is not invalidated because there are still some details being fine tuned and research continues into various details and mechanisms. That is how all science works.

[mgb]

The general concept that natural selection acts on DNA changes (mutations, insertions, deletions, etc.) and allows beneficial changes (in terms of survivability and higher reproduction rates) to spread and become fixed in a population, while deleterious changes do not, has been positively proven to be correct.

Much is made of Natural Selection but it is a simple a common sense notion and is operative in many fields outside biology. For example, a car manufacturer makes a better car; it will naturally have a better survival chance in the market place and the old version will go extinct. But this does not mean cars are not intelligently designed. There is an important lesson here; Natural Selection tells us nothing about how the changes come about - randomly or intelligently. Either way, Natural Selection obtains.

This is an important point. It is a mistake to say 'Oh look, natural selection is working' and then pretend that is evidence for the WHOLE theory. Natural selection is not evidence for random OR intelligent changes. It is just natural selection.

One of the major difficulties with the theory is this randomness idea. It is an utterly hopeless quest. Listen to Berlinski-

Like the nucleic acids, proteins are alphabetic objects, composed of discrete constituents. On average, proteins are roughly 250 amino acid residues in length, so a given protein may be imagined as a long biochemical word, one of many.
The aspects of an analogy are now in place. What is needed is a relevant contrast, something comparable to sentences and sequences in language. Of course nothing completely comparable is at hand: there are no sentences in molecular biology. Nonetheless, there is this fact, helpfully recounted by Richard Dawkins: "The actual animals that have ever lived on earth are a tiny subset of the theoretical animals that could exist." It follows that over the course of four billion years, life has expressed itself by means of a particular stock of proteins, a certain set of life-like words.
A combinatorial count is now possible. The MIT physicist Murray Eden, to whom I owe this argument, estimates the number of the viable proteins at 10 to the 50th power. Within this set is the raw material of everything that has ever lived: the flowering plants and the alien insects and the seagoing turtles and the sad shambling dinosaurs, the great evolutionary successes and the great evolutionary failures as well. These creatures are, quite literally, composed of the proteins that over the course of time have performed some useful function, with "usefulness" now standing for the sense of sentencehood in linguistics.
As in the case of language, what has once lived occupies some corner in the space of a larger array of possibilities, the actual residing in the shadow of the possible. The space of all possible proteins of a fixed length (250 residues, recall) is computed by multiplying 20 by itself 250 times (20 to the 250th power). It is idle to carry out the calculation. The numbers larger by far than seconds in the history of the world since the Big Bang or grains of sand on the shores of every sounding sea. Another planet now looms in the night sky, Pluto-sized or bigger, a conceptual companion to the planet containing every sequence composed by endlessly arranging the 26 English letters into sequences 100 letters in length. This planetary doppelganger is the planet of all possible proteins of fixed length, the planet, in a certain sense, of every conceivable form of carbon-based life...It would seem that evolution, Murray Eden writes in artfully ambiguous language, "was directed toward the incredibly small proportion of useful protein forms. . . ," the word "directed" conveying, at least to me, the sobering image of a stage-managed search, with evolution bypassing the awful immensity of all that frozen space because in some sense evolution knew where it was going.
And yet, from the perspective of Darwinian theory, it is chance that plays the crucial -- that plays the only role in generating the proteins. Wandering the surface of a planet, evolution wanders blindly, having forgotten where it has been, unsure of where it is going.

Another problem is growth and form. Here is a question for you. Consider a human skull. Take two curves in the skull; the curve of the orbit of the eye socket and the curve of the jaw bone. These are not simple curves, they are compound curves made up of subtly changing smaller curves.

How are these curves made? They are made by the way cells align with each other. Each cell must align with adjacent cells at a particular angle to make the required curve. So how does each cell know where it is in the skull and what part of the curve it is on? How does a cell in the eye socket know it is not in the jaw bone? Because these cells must behave differently to bring out the correct curve? How can they know - by means of a genetic code - if each cell has an identical code? There is no difference between a cell in the jaw bone and the eye socket so how do they behave differently?


The link you posted is too general for me to comment on but here is one quote from it;


Behind one series of such changes are the so-called homeotic genes, which dictate where legs or arms or eyes will form on a growing embryo. These central-control genes turned out to be almost identical even in animals as different as worms, flies and human beings. Many researchers now think that much of evolution works not so much through mutations, or random errors, in the major functional genes, but by tweaking the ways by which developmental genes control other genes.

So what's making these genes do the 'tweaking' if it is not random errors?

The difficulties with ToE are not loose ends to be fixed at leisure, they are serious technical problems.

[mgb]

If there was a purposeful God behind all of this, then that purposeful God would be responsible for every genetic mutation and birth defect etc.

These are often the result of the fall and of evil or human pollution.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 108 by mgb]

This is an important point. It is a mistake to say 'Oh look, natural selection is working' and then pretend that is evidence for the WHOLE theory. Natural selection is not evidence for random OR intelligent changes. It is just natural selection.

Exactly ... who claims otherwise? Just like ToE makes no statements about HOW life came into existence or the mechanism for that, natural selection makes no statements about HOW DNA changes come about. Darwin knew nothing about DNA, mutations, etc. so he could not possibly have built anything related to those, specifically, into his original formulation of ToE. Your complaint seems to be concerned with random mutations and the probability of those, rather than with ToE which does not specify how DNA changes arise. You're assigning something to ToE which isn't part of it (ie. the exact mechanism for how DNA changes happen).

Darwin observed variations in traits within a species (eg. heights of humans, beak lengths in finches) and appreciated that some of these variations might be beneficial if circumstances changed with the environment. In a given environment, there are finches of the same species with a bell curve variation in beak length. The width of this bell (Gaussian) curve is such that most finches in the population have no trouble finding food, mating, etc. But if a group of these finches flew to a neighboring island where their primary source of food was deeper into the flower, the finches under the bell curve at the longer beak length end would have an easier time getting food while those at the short beak end of the distribution would find it more difficult, or even impossible. Obviously, natural selection would create, over time, a population of finches in the new island with a similar bell curve for beak lengths as on the original island, but centered at a longer average beak length.

This is what Darwin observed, and it says nothing about HOW beak lengths change in finches. We know now that genes control this, and note that nothing new was required as far as a random mutation creating a new gene for this particular example. It is just that the finches with longer beaks in the original distribution had better survival and reproduction rates on the new island because of their longer beaks, and that trait became fixed in the population due to natural selection. This is what ToE is all about. The change could be a faster animal, more fur if climate cools, and countless other examples where no new mutations or DNA changes are required ... just "selection" for a certain trait because it confers a benefit even if that trait already existed in the distribution.

Mutations or other DNA changes (eg. epigenetic change to gene expression) would have the same effect if they proved beneficial, but ToE does not depend on this happening. It just falls into the same category. ToE doesn't care how these DNA changes occur, so you seem to be complaining about something that isn't ToE, but rather the mechanism of DNA change.

Berlinski is a crackpot so I don't pay any attention to anything he says. His attempts to rebut the Nilsson and Pelger paper on eye evolution estimates:

http://www.talkreason.org/articles/blurred.cfm#lund

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5c34/6 ... a1311f.pdf

gives a good idea of where he is coming from. But that statistical argument is way off base because there are constraints on which proteins are useful for living organisms. The statistical number of proteins 250 amino acids long that could be formed from 20 amino acids is irrelevant. The argument seemed to be that evolution ignored most of the statistical possible proteins, and therefore it isn't valid for some reason. A certain subset of these proteins were present in the first population of life forms on Earth (however that happened initially, which we don't know the mechanism for yet), and if ToE is correct all subsequent life descended from these initial populations. So you would perfectly well expect a similar set of proteins to be involved, along with new ones down the line, and not some random walk through probability space using every possible protein that could be made from 20 amino acids.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4889822/

So what's making these genes do the 'tweaking' if it is not random errors?

The difficulties with ToE are not loose ends to be fixed at leisure, they are serious technical problems.

Why do you think things like this (cells "knowing" what to do) has anything to do with ToE? You evidently didn't read a book I recommended earlier called Life Unfolding which does explain a lot of exactly this kind of thing during human development. Forming jaw bone curves vs. eye socket curves happens because of the signalling proteins and the specific gene expression sequences that occur during the process. So although all cells have the same complement of chromosomes and therefore genes, the specific expression of those genes and the signalling proteins that serve important "directing" functions are different. This is common ... Life Unfolding goes through many examples of this, including how genes on the Y chromosome interrupt the normal development of female genetalia starting at about 6 weeks and cause male genetalia to form from the same precursor materials (eg. scrotum instead of labial structure, penis instead of clitoris).

It is the same for jaw bone curves vs. eye socket curves. These develop the same in humans today because the process is defined by genes and gene expression, signaling proteins, etc. just like most other processes during development. There is no need for some intelligent designer to oversee the process. ToE is hugely supported by the observation that our relatives in the primate tree also have jaw bones and eye sockets that form during development the same way ours do. It is this passing down of "gene tweaking" as you call it across hundreds of thousands of generations and across species to produce similar processes within an entire taxonomic family that supports ToE, not the opposite. But your complaint seems to be with random mutations, not ToE.