But What If Darwin Was Wrong?

By David Gelernter | August 23, 2019

Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory. Once it was a daring guess. Today it is basic to the credo that defines the modern worldview. Accepting the theory as settled truth—no more subject to debate than the earth being round or the sky blue or force being mass times acceleration—certifies that you are devoutly orthodox in your scientific views; which in turn is an essential first step towards being taken seriously in any part of modern intellectual life.

But what if Darwin was wrong? ............

The advent of molecular biology made it possible to transform Darwinism into Neo-Darwinism. The new version explains (it doesn’t merely cite) natural variation, as the consequence of random change or mutation to the genetic information within cells that deal with reproduction. Those cells can pass genetic change onward to the next generation, thus changing—potentially—the future of the species and not just one individual’s career............

How to make proteins is our first question. Proteins are chains: linear sequences of atom-groups, each bonded to the next. A protein molecule is based on a chain of amino acids; 150 elements is a “modest-sized” chain; the average is 250. Each link is chosen, ordinarily, from one of 20 amino acids. A chain of amino acids is a polypeptide—“peptide” being the type of chemical bond that joins one amino acid to the next. But this chain is only the starting point: chemical forces among the links make parts of the chain twist themselves into helices; others straighten out, and then, sometimes, jackknife repeatedly, like a carpenter’s rule, into flat sheets. Then the whole assemblage folds itself up like a complex sheet of origami paper. And the actual 3-D shape of the resulting molecule is (as I have said) important.

Imagine a 150-element protein as a chain of 150 beads, each bead chosen from 20 varieties. But: only certain chains will work. Only certain bead combinations will form themselves into stable, useful, well-shaped proteins................Now at last we are ready to take Darwin out for a test drive. Starting with 150 links of gibberish, what are the chances that we can mutate our way to a useful new shape of protein? We can ask basically the same question in a more manageable way: what are the chances that a random 150-link sequence will create such a protein? Nonsense sequences are essentially random. Mutations are random. Make random changes to a random sequence and you get another random sequence. So, close your eyes, make 150 random choices from your 20 bead boxes and string up your beads in the order in which you chose them. What are the odds that you will come up with a useful new protein?.............To Read More.....

Gallup, Darwinism, and Scientism

August 5, 2019 By Bruce Walker

Gallup recently announced that forty percent of all Americans believe in creationism. A better storyline to its recent polling data might be that only one in five Americans believes in Darwinism, which was a wobbly theory when first proposed almost two centuries ago and which has become an increasingly improbable explanation for the origin of life and species during the last two hundred years. That would be a better storyline, but it is not the storyline presented by Gallup.

Darwinists are invariably the product of an educational system that has as little to do with free thought as the educational systems of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Groupthink, instead, is what these institutions create and nurture. There are no longer "schools of thought," but simply "settled science" and its detractors (those with free and thinking minds).

It is Darwinism, not its alternative theories, that is an intolerant system of blind faith that brooks no reconsideration, no conflicting scientific opinion, and no independent thought. This shows up not only in the purging of academicians who hold politically incorrect views in life sciences, which Ben Stein exposed in his 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but in deliberate mischaracterization of the debates about the origin of life..........  To Read More

1,000 scientists go public with doubts on evolution

'Careful examination of the evidence of Darwinian theory should be encouraged'

WND

More than 1,000 highly influential scientists from around the world have gone on record with their doubts about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.   They hail from institutions such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Tulane, Rice and Baylor, the National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, the British Museum and MIT’s Lincoln Library.

 

"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life,” they say in a statement. “Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

The scientists include the best in molecular biology, biochemistry, biology, entomology, computational quantum chemistry, microbiology, psychiatry and behavioral sciences, astrophysics, marine biology, cellular biology, physics and astronomy, math, physics, geology and anthropology, according to Evolution News, an online publication of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which promotes the theory of intelligent design.

 

The Discovery Institute first published its “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” list in The New York Review of Books in 2001 to challenge “false” claims from PBS’ series “Evolution".............To Read More....