Posted on 08/02/2019 7:49:16 PM PDT by robowombat
Famed Yale computer science professor quits believing Darwin’s theories JENNIFER KABBANY - FIX EDITOR •JULY 30, 2019
‘The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain’
David Gelernter, a famed Yale University professor, has publicly renounced his belief in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, calling it a “beautiful idea” that has been effectively disproven.
Gelernter, who is known for predicting the World Wide Web and has developed many complex computing tools over the years, is today a professor of computer science at Yale, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, member of the National Council of the Arts, and a prolific author.
In May, the Claremont Review of Books published a column by Gelernter headlined “Giving Up Darwin.” In it, he explained how his readings and discussions of Darwinian evolution and its competing theories, namely intelligent design, have convinced him Darwin had it wrong.
In particular, he cited Stephen Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt as well as The Deniable Darwin by David Berlinski. The professor expanded on his views in an interview with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution that was published last week.
Gelernter stops short of fully embracing intelligent design, both in his essay and during his interview. He said in his interview he sees intelligence in Earth’s design, and has no quarrel with ID proponents, but notes the world is a mess, its suffering far outweighs its goodness.
“My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me — it’s widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job — it’s an absolutely serious scientific argument,” Gelernter said during his interview. “In fact it’s the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind. It’s got to be dealt with intellectually.”
Gelernter conducted his interview alongside Meyer and Berlinski, and the three weighed in on the problems facing Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution.
Gelernter said an ideological bent has taken over the field of science. There are good scientists doing good work, “but we have a cautionary tale in what happened to our English departments and our history departments could happen to us, God forbid,” he said.
Gelernter said he likes many of his colleagues at Yale, that they are his friends, but when he looks at “their intellectual behavior, what they have published — and much more importantly what they tell their students — Darwinism has indeed passed beyond a scientific argument as far as they are concerned. You take your life in your hands to challenge it intellectually. They will destroy you if you challenge it.”
“Now, I haven’t been destroyed, I am not a biologist, and I don’t claim to be an authority on this topic,” Gelernter added, “but what I have seen in their behavior intellectually and at colleges across the West is nothing approaching free speech on this topic. It’s a bitter, fundamental, angry, outraged rejection [of intelligent design], which comes nowhere near scientific or intellectual discussion. I’ve seen that happen again and again.”
Gelernter acknowledges “I am attacking their religion and I don’t blame them for being all head up, it is a big issue for them.”
How does the field of biology get over Darwin? Gelernter said the outlook is bleak.
“Religion is imparted, more than anything else, by the parents to the children,” he said. “And young people are brought up as little Darwinists. Kids I see running around New Haven are all Darwinists. … The students in my class, they’re all Darwinsts. I am not hopeful.”
But in his piece for Claremont Review, Gelernter pointed out that “this is one of the most important intellectual issues of modern times, and every thinking person has the right and duty to judge for himself.”
“There’s no reason to doubt that Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape,” the professor wrote. “Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture — not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones. The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain.”
In his piece, Gelernter cited the Cambrian explosion as one insurmountable problem facing Darwinism. That’s because the fossil record shows “a striking variety of new organisms — including the first-ever animals — pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70-odd million years.” This directly contradicts the expectation by Darwin that “new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life.”
What’s more, Gelernter adds Darwin’s main problem is molecular biology, pointing out advances in technology have brought forth vast amounts of new information and understanding about the complexity of life, all of which has shown random mutation plus natural selection cannot generate new and complex creatures.
By the numbers, it’s impossible, the computer scientist points out.
He gives an anecdote on how hard it would be to create just one new protein by chance — the odds are so astronomical that there are fewer atoms in the entire universe in comparison: “The odds bury you. It can’t be done.”
Underscoring all that, the professor notes there are no examples in scientific literature showing that “mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole and are not fatal.”
In other words, the idea that random chance and mutations are the driving force behind the vast complexity of life — even with billions of years of time — is not just scientifically improbable, it’s an impossibility, the scholar argues in his piece.
“Darwin would easily have understood that minor mutations are common but can’t create significant evolutionary change; major mutations are rare and fatal,” Gelernter wrote. “It can hardly be surprising that the revolution in biological knowledge over the last half-century should call for a new understanding of the origin of species.”
Whether biology will rise to the challenge, and develop a better theory, remains to be seen, the professor concludes.
“How cleanly and quickly can the field get over Darwin, and move on?—with due allowance for every Darwinist’s having to study all the evidence for himself? There is one of most important questions facing science in the 21st century.”
“Every form of life shares the same DNA encoding mechanisms and that mechanism itself evolved as a more stable molecule from its RNA ancestor. The same five nucleotides, the same 20 amino acids, the same drift statistics in the mitochondrial DNA, the same cellular machinery of ribosomes generating proteins from mRNA copied from the nuclear DNA”
These observations also can be construed as evidence for design.
I see the commonality of biological molecules among life as being due to physics.
These molecules have the physical properties necessary for life.
If there were life elsewhere it would also have the same commonalities because physics and chemistry are the same though out the universe.
As we grow older, the life long nagging of Devine revelation will ultimately take its toll.
The True, The Good and The Beautiful will find it’s way through the most stubborn of minds.
“Is this sacrifice of the individual for the survival of the population something a loving intelligence would design in?”
Well - according to the Bible, that is exactly what happened in one particular instance!
Not bashing you - just found it striking!
If you take the ‘no’ out you also have to take the ‘not’ out.
So it would read: Therefore there are examples of mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole that ARE fatal.
An intelligent designer would not constrain every species this way because it would be redundant and inefficient and subject to massive failures due to disease and decay over time.
Hmm, come to think of it, also like Microsoft.
This is how Larry Summers lost his job as President of Harvard. Which took some doing, because IIRC, when he got his PhD, he was the youngest person ever to have been granted a PhD by Harvard.
It it long past time for a purge of the liberals and Marxists from all areas of life.
The *property* of Gold is very controversial.
Everyone wants to pretend it belongs to them. :-P
You just committed Star Trek blasphemy.
"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it."
No Intelligence Allowed is an excellent movie about the academic blackballing that is practiced against Intelligent Design.
So, let us in on the truth so we can all be in the know....
In my 75 years of experience, discussions like this one, requiring an intuitive or working ability to use or discuss mathematical sizing, is problematic for most. Revealing the simple mathematical fact that the Sun’s volume equals the total volumes of 1 million 3 hundred thousand Earths is an impossible mental feat for most to accomplish. Comprehending the size and complexity of the DNA code is another example. Most are incapable of intuitively sizing these phenomena.
And a biologist isn't a mathematician ...
Te fossil record as yet to provide a single bridge animal demonstrating transition from one creature to another. Without this there is no evidence of evolution. We know that animals change their characteristics based on disparate gene pools. Some fish of the same species may vary considerably as remote populations.
Science long ago gave up Darwin as a solid bedrock set of scientific principles. The notion of gradual change over millennium remains a decided belief. The difficulty is there is no hard evidence that monkeys became man or that fish learned to walk on land. There are no transition fossils showing these changes are linked.
All that is required to convert chaos into order is an energy source.
Every morning the Sun rises.
No need for hypotheticals of randomness and winning the lottery.
You are confusing adaptations with evolved species. By your definition a redhead is a different species than a blond person. Where did life come from?
The bad part of my post was my reference to George Carlin’s idiom about our phylum inference to monkeys in that since we evolved from them, why are they still here?
It’s the same answer, since we increased our knowledge and our ability to reason with what could only be called natural selection, why is he still here?
rwood
This may be off topic, but I have always noticed that intelligent design is completely incompatible with free will.
God creates you with His own personal chemical formula.
He chooses the time period and the geographic region you grow up in.
He chooses your parents and your family.
He chooses your IQ and your physical abilities and disabilities.
Then, He tells you if you do not calmly accept every decision He has made, and if you do not worship Him, He will torture you for all eternity after you die.
Forget that noise!
Human beings do not have free will unless they have a fully informed opportunity to opt out of being born.
——Then, He tells you if you do not calmly accept every decision He has made, and if you do not worship Him, He will torture you for all eternity after you die.——
Clearly, you have a very strange concept of God and free will...
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