IF YOU PAID attention to what was in the textbooks and what the teachers taught in biology in high school and college in the past fifty years, and before that, you probably would have learned a lot of things taught as hard scientific facts which turn out to not only be wrong but from very to completely wrong.* Some of the errors were based on chemistry that was true, in so far as they partially knew it but their conclusions were not only wrong but in many ways, very dangerously wrong. In one of the talks by James Shapiro I transcribed from the past year, he talked about how the Surgeon-General of the United States in the late 1960s, based on the latest current reigning dogmas concerning the fixed nature of DNA within bacteria, said there was no danger of generating antibiotic immunity in bacteria so there was no danger in, for example, prescribing tetracycline freely, in reality, putting the usefulness of a very useful antibiotic at risk as bacteria developed resistance to the drug.
When I heard that I recalled how my doctor during those years did just that, he gave out prescriptions for tetracycline as if they were no more consequential than a box of Good and Plenty you'd buy at the movie theater. And some of the economic dogmas of market economist idiots (sorry for the tautology) like Milton Friedman seemed to be feeding off of the same then seemingly good but, actually, bad science. so he advocated overturning huge parts of the regulation of drugs and controlling what got released to the public. I wouldn't be surprised if some of that fed into the contemporary judicial idiocy that led the increasingly Republican dominated Supreme Court into the disastrous decision to allow direct marketing to potential patients by the drug industry, something which the idiot civil liberties industry figures such as from the ACLU also had a hand in. If I had the time I'd go back to look at the various amici briefs submitted to the court to see if the dead hand of that wrong science might be visible in the claims made.
If you paid close attention to more than the surface claims made in biology classes in high school and then kept up with what actual experimental and observational evidence showed in the past sixty years, you'd realize how shocking the most recent science dealing with the central ideology of biology and the alleged sciences and social sciences that parasitize it, still, really is. How much of what included Neo-Darwinism as its basic ideological assumption has to fall with it. That's something that even a secular reading of current science forces you to conclude, how much of what my and subsequent generations were taught as hard science - the entirety of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, among the most publicly influential** - is just plain wrong and its conclusions a misrepresentation of reality. I will get to some of the other readings possible from it after I give you the next section of the talk Denis Noble gave.
Now I want to come to some proofs that 20th century gene-centric biology - the idea that genes are the blue-print for life, that they, alone can develop into us - is necessarily wrong. And there are four major dogmas.
First is the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, I'll explain that in just a moment. The second is a dogma called The Weismann Barrier, again, I'll explain that in a moment. The third dogma is that DNA can replicate itself "just like a crystal." And the fourth dogma is that DNA is separate from its vehicle, that is the cell that carries it and I'll just go through these very simply.
The central dogma of molecular biology is, in fact, a very simple chemical fact, that from DNA we make another kind of nucleotide called RNA and that enables our bodies to make proteins. Proteins are the real driver of activity in living organisms. Now, that's a simple chemical fact, DNA forms RNA that forms proteins. But that simple chemical fact does not prevent the organism editing and changing its genes. What the standard biologists will tell you is, well, it does prevent that because you can't go backwards, you can't go from proteins to make DNA. The point is that you don't need to, the body knows how to control its genes without that being the case. So, first point, the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology does not prevent organisms changing their DNA when they need to.
The second dogma, the second foundation stone of modern evolutionary biology is the Weismann barrier, this is the idea, introduced over a hundred forty years ago by a geneticist called August Weismann, it's the idea that the egg cells and sperm cells in the reproductive organs are totally isolated from the rest of the body. So there's no way in which my body learns during its life can be transmitted to the egg and sperm to form the future generation. Well, I have to tell you that little molecules called "control RNAs," but don't' worry about the technical term, little molecules called control RNAs are shown to communicate body characteristics like whether your metabolism is this way-round or that way-round to the germ cells via tiny little packets of molecular information. There is no Weismann barrier. It's not able to prevent transmission from the body to the egg cell.
CJ: Are you referring to epigenetics here or something else?
DN: Good point. It is to some extent epigenetic.
So, the third major assumption of standard evolutionary biology is that not only is DNA the source of everything that's needed to create us, it accurately self-replicates, it doesn't need anything to control that. Well, it's simply not true. It is true, coming back to the four types of nucleotides [what is generally given as"A,T C and G"], A will attract a T and G will attract a C, that is true and that helps the replication of DNA but the error rate of that is such that there would be hundreds of thousands of errors in the DNA as one of our cells divides to form two new cells. And what happens is amazing. The cells, themselves, contain the proteins necessary to cut and paste the DNA and to correct all of those errors. So, the replication of DNA depends upon that ability of the living cell. And only a living cell can do that.
And the final fundamental dogma is that the replicator, that is DNA is separate from its vehicle which is the cell or, if you like, our bodies. The fact is since self-replication of DNA is impossible in our genomes the replicator cannot be seen as separate from its vehicle.
So, the correct interpretation of the molecular biological evidence shows that all of these four fundamental assumptions of modern biology are incorrect.
So, just to summarize where I've got to in this part of the talk:
Living organisms can change their DNA. And, incidentally, you and I were experiencing exactly that during the pandemic. How else could our immune systems be able to change the DNA coding for what are called immunoglobulins, that's a long technical term, the part of our immune system that grabs the virus and neutralizes it, how is it possible for the immune system to do that? It's because the immune system, like other systems in our bodies is capable of changing the DNA. It actually creates millions of new possible shapes of that protein that captures the virus. So we know that organisms can change their DNA and the Central Dogma clearly does not prevent that and as I said this is precisely what was happening during the pandemic.
Second major point in the summary here is DNA itself is not a self-replicator it needs the living cell to do that.
And the third take-home message from this part of the talk is that body characteristics can be communicated to the germ-line, that is the future eggs and sperm via small particles that transmit from the body to those cells. The Weismann barrier is not really a barrier.
Now, why is this all important?
Denis Noble went on to give scientific reasons that's important and, far more importantly, what that will mean for those trying to save the biosphere and life in the future that neither he nor I will live long enough to see much of. Denis Noble would not seem to be a religious believer, as I have mentioned he takes the step outside of science make the claim that you "don't need God" because the membranous structures of the cell can provide so much of the regulatory function that the old-fashioned naive view of genetics and biology assigned to DNA.
I, though, look at the same science and don't just take the membranous structures of cells as a given, I have to ask where those came from and how those have the abilities they have as parts of living organisms, abilities which no non-living molecular structures would seem to have. Both Denis Noble and James Shapiro have pointed out that when non-living crystalline structures are made there are large numbers of "errors" in the molecular formation of the forming crystal, things such as, I'd imagine, those chemical inclusions of metallic molecules within diamonds that give them different colors which works for a pretty rock but which would never allow life functions to continue in a living organism unless the crystalline structures making those up were corrected to a stunningly lower percentage of errors. Such a high percentage of errors in that chemical-physical process is incompatible with life processes, which both of them readily point out. Clearly those couldn't have come from any known properties of inorganic chemistry or even much of organic chemistry, certainly not as features of elemental chemistry as that exists in a natural setting. So that would have come from somewhere which I doubt reductionist materialism will ever be able to account for.
I'm fully prepared, considering what is known about life processes and the replication of life, that it has to happen within not only some kind of membrane BUT A COMPLEX, BIOLOGICALLY ACTIVE MEMBRANE that that would have been true for the theoretical first organism of life on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy or universe - if it is a line of life anything like our own to have ever existed. I can't find any reason to believe such a complex structure could possibly have just come about through random chance interactions between molecules, even supposedly naturally occurring amino acids, in the presumably very life-hostile atmosphere and surface of the early Earth. Not in the numbers of molecules it would have taken to form a "very simple" living organism's containing membrane as it just happened to enclose the other complex molecules and structures necessary for "very simple" life to have come about. The seemingly random chance probability of that happening in the first place and a very high chance against its long-term survival in those conditions is matched with added factors of improbability against its continued metabolism and the incredible improbability of it reproducing the molecular and other structures within its body the correctly dividing into two or more of itself, resealing its containing membranes, correctly, the first and most all of every subsequent time and I think the idea that it just happened by random chance, itself, plummets into irrational faith based on materialism and the gods of materialism.
It was one of the selling points of the ever more seemingly absurd materialist-reductionist cartoon of how life began that it was assumed to be what we ever more surely know it was not and could not have been, simple in the way that chemists can describe inorganic and non-living chemical bonding. The plausibility of 18th, 19th, 20th century materialist-atheist-scientism depended and still depends on that unrealistic assumption of simplicity, I'd say that line of the ideological use of such assumed simplicity goes all the way back to the ancient and classical atomists and the ancient atheists who based their claims on that mistaken faith in such simplicity. Without that simplicity, what they really have is what I've called atheism of the gaps, presumed "simplicity" supplying the gap in what is known.
Though they'd deny what they're doing, today they turn "random chance" from a process of probability mathematics into a creator god of infinitely greater implausibility than the God of Moses, Jacob and Jesus or many of the other names and stories told about God in other traditions. I find the "God" of the fundamentalists, who I don't believe in, more plausible than the creator god of atheist materialism and I think the morality derived from even that anti-Christian god is superior to that which materialism leads to. I'd rather take my chances with a lot of the anti-LGBTQ+. old-order anabaptists, especially those of the peace churches over and above the gods of materialism and atheism.
Though, as I mention at the top of this post, I think even the secular consequences of that ideological abuse of science are dangerous enough so we should all throw the old line into the boneyard of discontinued science I'll also point out that the deadly enemies of this most recent biology include many of the big names in current anti-religious polemics. That presence of some of the most vicious opponents of current biology within science is a good indication of the ideological character of the gene-centric, neo-Darwinist orthodoxy and the actual motives of much of why it is retained as their central ideology. The online war that Jerry Coyne waged against his University of Chicago colleague James Shapiro include some of the most vicious attacks on science in recent times. And the same words and phrases were echoed in the sciencey new-atheist blogopshere. For example, I read any number of scienctist written blog posts deriding and ridiculing "junk DNA" even as Shaprio and others proved that a more up to date and evidenced view of that molecule showed it was nothing like "junk" but was vital in some of the most important workings of the very molecule, itself. "Junk DNA" figured highly as one of the favorite online arguments against the existence of God as well as championing an already antiquated view of molecular biology. I think it was in response to one of those that I noted they were arguing for atheism of the gaps, those gaps being in previous ignorance of the function of those long chains of amino-acids. Only some the atheists who understood any of it from the start got that point, the sci-ranger boys and gals were clueless. It's remarkable how many of those who were credentialed by colleges and universities only know how to toss around phrases as club slogans without having any real idea of what they mean.
* A couple of years ago a friend told me about her uncle who was still alive and cognitively sharp quite past the age of a hundred who learned scientific racism from the textbooks he had in high school and college before WWII and still believed it because "it's science." I would assume those might well include the same Civic Biology textbook which featured in the Scopes Trial. It was one of the most widely used high-school textbooks of the period and it explicitly taught scientific racism and eugenics as science. The imaginary champions of science who believe Inherit the Wind was a history lesson were unwittingly championing that kind of science. That is the kind of thing that came back after its temporary discrediting from the scandal of what the Nazis did with that science. From the 1970s onward as the Darwinist fundamentalism of Sociobiology and evo-psy took hold. I think the naive view of genetics starting with the generation of Karl Pearson and the last years of Francis Galton inevitably leads to those, especially when tied to the theory of natural selection. That will be the case until all of that stuff is junked. In one of the slides that Denis Noble showed it references the 40th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene, apart from wondering if Dawkins still includes the "first bird to call out" fable which is an epic example of really, really bad scientific lore. I'd bet he does. But I wonder, far more, if in his God Delusion he still lauds the antisemitic scientific claims of John Hartung which seem to be derived from the overt scientific antisemitism successfully reinserted into science by Kevin MacDonald. I have written in the past about such antisemitism being inserted into science by such luminaries of Darwinism as Karl Pearson in the run-up to the Nazi's "final solution."
I might add that in his very last months, E.O. Wilson seems to have admitted there were problems with Sociobiology, which he invented, much to the displeasure of the large number of scientists who had professional interests in his 1970s theory and its progeny, evolutionary psychology. I haven't looked deeply into why he did that so I don't know what his motives were. I expect it will take at least two generations of younger biologists dying off before the bad science involved will be quietly pushed to one side. It will take longer for them to admit that natural selection is an ideologically motivated imaginary "force" of nature which can't be demonstrated to have actually, ever, been a thing.
** It isn't any mere coincidence that Richard Dawkins' famous "selfish gene" idea figures so strongly in what both Denis Noble and James Shaprio have to argue against. The theory of natural selection which is, actually, what neo-Darwinism was invented to rescue, is the original idea that selfishness is the basis of progress in evolution. That was realized within the first decade after On The Origin of Species was published. The "struggle for existence" that figured so highly and explicitly in the theory of natural selection from the time of its invention was intrinsic to the idea, in short. The struggle for organisms to survive and dominate within their species, the opposite of what secularists know as "altruism" and charity which constitutes the moral basis of many religions.
That made, in academic-scientific terms, "altruism" an unsolvable problem for Darwinists, some of whom didn't want to give up the idea that altruism was good and many others who realized that replacing generosity, charity, especially doing for those who are less fortunate or strong or intelligent among us would be a very hard sell to the general public which were largely culturally, at least, Christians. The latter group dominated in the scientific view of natural selection as they invented eugenics and started trying to talk, first the educated class who were comprised then mostly of the rich, the well-off, the favored by the very unnatural civil law and economic culture, and from that basis, the rest of society to give up the moral content of Christianity, Judaism and, I guess, other religions that didn't much figure into the thinking of that class in the West.
It wasn't a hard sell to many of the rich and privileged to give up the idea that they had some kind of durable moral obligation to support the lives and even dignity of the least among us, that was the opposite of the difficulty of convincing the rich and powerful that they had that obligation throughout the history of Abrahamic monotheism, late classical and feudal Christianity in the first place. That was true, in no small part, to the fact that once held by a family great wealth was made very easy for them to hold on to, whatever struggling required could be done through hiring solders and others to carry out the violence or by forcing underlings to do that, to less or no danger to the ones holding that wealth. The structure of civil law figured heavily in that, even during the worst empires and monarchies. The hierarchies and norms of imperial systems and monarchy and economically and socially stratified republics are designed to do that, among other things. It's little to no surprise that the aristocracy of Victorian era Britain, America, Prussia, etc. who would never have to actually engage in a struggle to the death found, first, Malthusian style economics and then its child, natural selection, so appealing. Especially as it not only absolved them from an obligation to share their wealth with the poor and destitute, it made selfishness into a virtue, driving the progress of the human species to ever higher levels, It's no wonder that the idea appealed to the likes of John Rockefeller. Darwin explicitly said that in The Descent of Man and so did virtually all others who adopted natural selection even as they hypocritically claimed to not believe that evolution was a progressive force of nature - speaking out of both sides of their mouths is among the most obvious but least recognized characteristics of Darwinian ideology. Such a population and the emerged upper-middle class that aspired with some hope to that level, largely made up the university and college educated class that were the first ones Darwinism was marketed to.
But the population in general, culturally Christian, Jewish, etc. were a harder sell on the idea that the least among us should be left to suffer and perish in a "struggle for existence." Even more so that they should be harried out of existence, actively, another immediate conclusion that rose within Darwinism with Darwin's active support. That remained as a problem, probably especially as the 20th century progressed and larger numbers of the working class and even those from poverty rose academically through public education to go to and flourish academically at colleges and universities. In the neo-Darwinian synthesis years, that problem was dealt with through mathematical modeling by W. D, Hamilton who, through some typical Darwinian double-speak, claimed, in effect, that altruism was, in fact, a part of that "struggle for existence" (a phrase that was deemphisized within the genteel post WWII generation of academic Darwinists, even as it never stopped being the basis of the theory) in that acts of altruism were made to enable the survival of the genes which the "altruist" shared with those who benefitted from their acts of self-sacrifice, had an imaginary better chance of being propagated in the next generation. Though the scientific racism which was supported by the theory of natural selection was often a far easier sell even among the working and lower classes. Racism was a pre-existing mental illness among so many in every class. The theory of natural selection exacerbated that in many ways.
Hamilton and his disciples seem to forget that for natural selection to work, at all, such "traits" as they imagined-up couldn't be held universally within a species but would have to have been absent from a significant number of the members of that species in order for "nature" to have anything to "select" by. A universally held "trait" within a species couldn't be the object of natural selection.
So any "genetic altruistic" sacrifice by those holding that imagined genetic trait would have benefited the breeding potential of those which didn't carry that imaginary self-sacrificing gene. That oversight was the basis of both socio-biology and evolutionary psychology in the next decade even as the idea, itself, is mathematical nonsense because, to repeat that point, every time one of their imaginary "altruism gene carrying" altruists died it would, actually, have slightly lessened the percentage of those in the species carrying such genes and it would have removed a potential source of that gene from the breeding population of that species. The more Hamiltonian "altruism" worked, the lower that percentage in the population would have been, actually benefiting those in the species that didn't carry "genetic altruism." I have presented that point to a number of evo-psy believing people with even that low level of mathematical awareness and not one of them has been able to tell me what is wrong with my critique of the idea. And there are other things wrong with the most popular fables of it. I think that, if anything, it would have to conclude that any such "genetic altruism" would, over eons, have been obliterated by natural selection.
I also, by the way, think it's absurd to base any conclusion about observed behaviors in animals such as ants so far removed from, for example, human beings as being relevant to quite different behaviors among those very distantly related animals with entirely different lives and means of reproduction. For a start, we have no way of knowing how ants see their own behavior, we could be reading it entirely wrongly and any such "reading" of the observations so as to support any particular theory or ideology is bound to determine what it is claimed is being seen. To attribute such behavior to genes, the idea of "a gene" being a rather troubled abstraction, itself, is hardly science. Yet enormous amounts of current putative biology is based on such conjecture removed from any possibility of actual confirmation.
For a different, detailed critique of "Hamilton's rule" this paper, of which E.O. Wilson is a co-author, states that it cannot make any prediction, whatsoever.
Note this passage in the summary:
In short, there is a startling discrepancy between the common intuitive understanding of Hamilton’s rule and the derivation of this rule that has been described as exact and general. In some cases, this discrepancy can be seen within a single paper. For example, ref. 7 uses 18 different variations of “Hamilton’s rule correctly predicts…” in reference to HRG, which makes no prediction at all.
But because, as Denis Noble says, Richard Dawkins can write convincingly, which I admit he can on a popular and even a rather mid-brow academic level, that idea sold well to the academics and those in the media and high-school teaching class that the idea dominated even though it had little to no actual evidence and it was, in fact, irrational in many respects. There were those even within Darwinism who rejected it, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Ruth Hubbard, . . . but their reasoned arguments were harder to grasp even when such fine writers as they were explained them. And those criticisms went against the general cultural movements descending into the period of Thatcher and Reagan era economic fantasies - in no small part an aspect of the culture of Darwinism that dominated so much of the imagination of those in the media and within academia and big business. I read and understood the arguments they made against it, I read the literature that came from their Sociobiology Study Group and realized that sociobiology and its immediate successor, evolutionary psychology were just more of the same eugenics level bad science of which Darwinism has contributed more of than any other scientific ideology that I'm aware of.
