Posted on 09/10/2013 10:07:53 AM PDT by Hoodat
Beautifully said, dear brother in Christ!
And mathematics requires metrics - quantities and units of measure.
So does that mean that any thing not susceptible of test or metrical description does not exist? How does Darwin's theory itself escape such a fate?
Here's an observation from [physicist] Menas Kafatos' article — "The Science of Wholeness," which appeared in the Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, Volume CVII, 2011 — which lays out the problem:
Today's science has achieved remarkable successes and is an indispensable aspect of humanity. Without science, there can be no progress. Yet, science cannot explain, it is not equipped to explain anything that is not subject to algorithmic rules, to ordinary mathematical descriptions, or in the case of physical systems, partial differential equations. It cannot explain the qualitative aspects of reality. Present science cannot completely explain not only living processes in large aggregates of cells, organisms, etc., or what we may term holistic organizations (it certainly has great success to account for molecular biochemical processes), but also noetic aspects of reality, mind and consciousness. It cannot explain or even account for the experiences of art, for the entire experience of human life, driven by the emotional levels of the psyche. And certainly it has little to say about the deep underlying nature of the cosmos, or reality, in general.Reductionism and the machine metaphor are dead ends for biology. So is the supposition that all causation is local causation.
We believe that present-day science needs to be extended beyond its present limits and it needs a new ontological model of reality, what we term here the science of wholeness. A revised methodology, which derives from the above ontological model will have to follow. The methodology in laying the foundations of science of wholeness would indicate that rather than pursuing distinct but separate paths in trying to understand the universe and human experience, that these realities ought to be considered together, an undivided whole. As Kafatos and Draganescu (2007) have pointed out, we may not be able to account for the whole levels of life and explain noetic aspects without knowing the nature of the underlying reality. We should compare our approach to the seminal work of [David] Bohm (1980), who perhaps more than any other physicist explored the underlying levels of reality, giving rise to wholeness, what he termed the implicate order. [bolds added for emphasis.]
What we need is a paradigm shift in the natural sciences. I think one's coming — but it's coming out of physics and mathematics — DO see [mathematician] Robert Rosen's splendid books, Life Itself and Essays on Life Itself for details.
It's the mathematicians and physicists who are out-front in the study of living systems these days. Biologists seem to be dragging their feet....
I think that may be because Darwinist evolution theory is one of the most successful myths of all time: It has achieved "dogmatic form."
What do you think? Can you think of any reason why scientists would require that theories be based on something that can be empirically quantified or qualified? The history of the development of science, and it's embrace of empiricism and the reasons why is no secret.
How does Darwin's theory itself escape such a fate?
It relies on evidence that can be observed and expressed empirically. There is evidence of many forms of life having existed in the past that are now extict, and new forms of life appearing along a time scale. We know mutations happen, and that they can change the form of an organism.
As you know those views are seen only thru the eyes of another who does nothing without revealing it first.
You are so right there are ‘different’ trees “in abundance”....enough and more to confuse/blurr the movements and maneuver's happening in plain sight. But of course that IS the intention.
'Watch' is the word used many times...and with reason. But if one isn't focused on what we are to watch for then ones view can only be the trees.
Science deals in theories, not proofs.
Fine. Let me know when your mathematician comes up with the equation that proves "trancendental" causes.
Mathematical models can only be as good as the your understanding of what's being modeled. I don't believe anyone even knows what all the possible variables are yet. Claiming to have a mathematical model seems a little premature.
And what did he prove?
Yes they do. Usually in ways that are deleterious to the organism's survival prospects. But on Darwin's theory, "Nature" selects those rare mutations that are helpful to "survival fitness." And this is how speciation occurs.
You asked, "Can you think of any reason why scientists would require that theories be based on something that can be empirically quantified or qualified?"
Because they're only interested in "How?" questions, and not "Why?" questions?
It seems there are all kinds of things in the world that are empirical or phenomenological which can't be either directly observed or quantified. Mind would be a case in point. Indeed, so also is Life itself.
What Darwinism seems to want us to believe is "that the numerous and prima facie improbable physical and biological requirements for life all fell together just by a fluke, like so many dice tumbling out of a bag and landing all sixes," as M.I.T.'s Roger White puts it.
Not so long ago, scientists suggested that the very earliest living organism was the result of a "chance collision of molecules" in a pre-biotic soup, where this was not meant to be incompatible with determinism. I think we have a good enough grip on what they had in mind: some simple molecules were shuffling about in the soup — much like shaking Lego pieces in a box — until they just happened to form a stable structure capable of reproduction. It is this kind of view that is being denied when contemporary theorists insist that life did not originate by chance. — Roger White, "Does Origins of Life Research Rest on a Mistake?"At this point, a good Darwinist will say that Darwin's theory isn't about the origin of life, just how it evolves once it's here. Some ill-defined something is evolving. Which to me is reminiscent of how primitive peoples thought about the issue:
To the ancients, life simply was; it was a given, a first principle, in terms of which other things were to be explained. Life vanished as an explanatory principle with the rise of mechanics, when Newton showed that the mysteries of the stars and the planets yielded to a few simple rules in which life played no part, when Laplace could proudly say "Je n'ai pas besoin de cet hypothèse" [I have no need of that {God} hypothesis]; when the successive mysteries of nature seemed to yield to understanding based on inanimate nature alone; only then was it clear that life itself was something that had to be explained. — Robert Rosen, Life ItselfDarwin's theory is consistent with materialism, reductionism, mechanism. But it doesn't have a word to say about Life; because Life is not reducible to materialism, reductionism, or mechanism. It is not something that can be stated in terms of scientific metrics or differential equations.
But it is definitely empirical and phenomenological.
I join my dearest sister in Christ, Alamo-Girl, in urging you to read Rosen's splendid book! Thanks for writing, tacticalogic!
You appear to be describing abiogenesis. I cannot find that addressed in the Theory of Evolution, and have no compulsion to attempt revisionism to include it.
Abiogenesis is not "in" the Theory of Evolution. Though we do know that Darwin speculated about a "warm little pond" scenario for the origin of life in a private communication to a friend. However, Darwin never included this speculation in any of his books. I figure that means he had low confidence in it.
Basically, my gripe is not with Darwin, but with his successors and "promoters," in particular Haeckel....
Anyhoot, abiogenesis theory is basically a non-starter. It presumes, as Hubert Yockey points out, that the origin of life "is just complicated chemistry and that the pathway to the origin of life, if it could be found, is emergent from organic chemistry." [Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, 2005]
Yockey is a mathematician with high confidence in Claude Shannon's information theory respecting biological systems. He believes that Francis Crick is right that there is a "Central Dogma" that defines how information is transferred between DNA, mRNA, and proteins.
Francis Crick (1958) published The Central Dogma, stating his view of how DNA, mRNA and protein interact. The Central Dogma states that information can be transferred from DNA to DNA, DNA to mRNA and mRNA to protein. Three transfers that the Central Dogma states never occur are protein to protein, protein to DNA, protein to mRNA....Abiogenesis experiments start out with amino acids, in hopes of "boot strapping" them into proteins. If the Central Dogma is correct — and Yockey believes it is, see below — then even if the experiment is successful in obtaining proteins, we still have zero information about how mRNA and DNA evolve — from proteins — in the abiogenetic scenario.
[Crick] emphasized, correctly, that there is no flow of matter, but, rather, "...sequence information from one polymer molecule to another"....Anyhoot, it wasn't Darwin who got the ball moving on abiogenesis as an explanation for the origin of life. It was later scientists such as Miller and Urey, who as chemists were evidently impressed with the ToE. Their experiments seem to be consistent with the Darwinian view of "accident," of randomness and natural selection. Above all, to some extent at least, it seems clear to me that the motivation of such pursuits, as was likely the case with Darwin, is to explain biology without reference to a creator, to show that "Nature did it!!!" by means of spontaneous chemical reactions that are basically directionless.
The genetic code has a Central Dogma because it is redundant. As a result, except for Trytophan and Methionine, it is undecidable which source code letter was actually sent from mRNA. The Central Dogma, stated correctly, is a mathematical property of any computing or information processing system that uses a redundant code. It is not a fundamental property of the chemistry of nucleic acids and amino acids.... Two alphabets are isomorphic, if and only if, they have the same Shannon entropy.... The Shannon entropy of the DNA alphabet and the mRNA alphabet is log2 64.... The Shannon entropy of the proteome alphabet is log2 20; thus, like all codes between sequences that are not isomorphic, the genetic code has a Central Dogma. No code exists that allows information to be transferred from protein sequences to mRNA. Therefore, it is impossible for the origin of life to be "proteins first"....
The restrictions of the Central Dogma on the origin of life are mathematical.... Scientists cannot get around them by clever chemistry. Likewise, Nature's proscription against the building of perpetual motion machines is also mathematical. The Second Law of Thermodynamics places a severe limit on the ability of a clever engineer to build machines that derive work from heat. Regardless of the choice of materials or design it is impossible to build a perpetual motion machine. These restrictions apply however socially, politically, and environmentally desirable it may be to make perpetual motion machines.
Once the mathematicians and the physicists take their place at the biological table (so to speak), new insights are gained.
Just some thoughts, dear tacticalogic. Thank you so much for writing!
I greatly appreciate the Yockey excerpts.
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