Before getting started. For anyone who is new here, I handle hate-comments on my terms, not the terms of the one sending it my way. Unless it serves my purpose or amuses me, I don't post comments that carry lies or libels about third parties, I don't post comments that contain claims and points that are not relevant to my purpose. I don't post comments that are not fun for me to refute.
THE NEO-DARWINIAN SYNTHESIS, that is the only iteration of Darwinism that can work today, which is the ruling and generally enforced ideology of science and academia cannot contain most of the cutting edge research into cell and organism physiology and much of the research into such topics as DNA. In my reading and listening that is most clearly the case in the work and writing of first James Shapiro and then of such other researchers as Denis Nobel. I have great respect for both of them because they are honest and both scientifically and philosophically astute enough to understand that the Darwinian view of evolution, natural selection of "traits" which are the product of random-chance mutations working on the physical "mechanism" of biological inheritance - cannot work as described. Which alone makes them the target of the mainstream of ideological biologists and other scientists. I used to follow the war that such as Shapiro's colleague at the University of Chicago, Jerry Coyne waged against him but I have lost touch with it over the years.
The basic insight of much of this comes from the careful observation of single-cell life, both as individual organisms and cells within multicellular organisms. The clear and unmistakable conclusion from that research, and the earliest of it goes back to the work of Barbara McClintock in the 1930s and in the subsequent century have built up an enormous literature of observation of nature and experiments that support it, that there is cognition going on in the organisms that comprise the "simplest" of life forms we know about now. He states that in an article called "All Living Cells Are Cognitive."
Cognition is a basic feature of life because all living organisms have to adapt their physiology and behaviour to novel circumstances. Biological cognition means that cells are able to perceive changing features of their internal and external environment and undertake responses directed to survival, growth, and reproduction of themselves or their clonal relatives. Since it is not possible to document this statement comprehensively for every different kind of living cell, I ask the reader to accept one assumption: If we can establish that the simplest and smallest cells on the planet, Bacteria and Archaea, display cognitive behaviors [1], then we can take it as reasonable to conclude that this capability was not lost, about 2 billion years ago, when a bacterial cell merged with an archaeal cell to generate the initial mitochondrion-bearing ancestor of all eukaryotic cells.
In the abstract of his paper, James Shapiro states it plainly:
These observations indicate that all living cells are cognitive.
He and his colleagues have given so many clear instances in which some level of cellular cognition of an extremely detailed level dealing with their own physiology IN RESPONSE TO THEIR ENVIRONMENTS and the kinds of changes in the DNA that happen in ways and with such success (both in benefit to the organism in response to environmental opportunities and challenges AND THE FACT THAT MOST OF THE CELLS DON'T DIE IN THESE CELL-CONDUCTED "EXPERIMENTS") that what humans would conclude had to be under the control of some amazingly high level cognition that I don't doubt that if human biology and physiology and organic molecular chemistry continue, any dominant or reigning ideology of the future will have to contain those conclusions.
James Shapiro has told the truth about this, that the enormous amount of research showing that on the most basic level, change in organisms, the stuff that evolution is made of, cannot be on the basis of random-chance. Early in his talk "Why Evolution Works: Life Doesn't Wait For Accidents" he presented a slide that contains the information that random mutation cannot explain evolutionary variation. There are vanishingly small probabilities of generating significant genetic code through random chance, an enormously generous stipulation that 1% of that happening would mean a positive mutations would occur under random mutation, that is mutations that would be favorable to the survival and flourishing of a cell or an organism, would mean that for a small adaptive sequence of 10 base-pairs in the DNA, had a chance of that working in neo-Darwinian terms in ten to the minus twenty.
In his talk he said:
That's 1 in 10 million, million billion billion billion generations which is impossibly small. So Random changes are not going to work, it has to be some more organized process.
If that were not the case then a scientist observing cells would have almost no chance of observing such positive cellular change and, in every case they could reasonably expect to see in a lifetime of looking for it, they would only see destructive and fatal cellular changes. And, of course, whatever the rate of "random-chance" changes would be in an organism you would not expect those to do anything but cause injury to the organism, its offspring which survive, and likely would almost uniformly lead to the deaths and extinctions of their species. At least that's my conclusion as to the consequences for evolution of what this means. But the opposite is seen everywhere in the living environment and world in which reproduction in mature organisms in which such basic chemical changes are happening, continually, is successful.
It would be expected that a rabid neo-Darwinist would resent any such research and the conclusions it forces that cognition, OK, I'll finally say the word INTELLIGENCE is present in even the simplest one-cell organism and that intelligence is what produces evolutionary change in organisms and in species of organisms. That is even if you define such work as Shapiro does as a "third way" of evolutionary thought, opposed to Darwinism and "intelligent design" which is both a politic way of putting it if you want to maintain a career in academia and if you want to uphold a materialist view of reality but anyone who has no such stake in academic careerism or in materialist ideology is entirely in their rights to draw conclusions for them in favor of what Theodosius Dobzhansky called his own belief in evolution, "intelligent design."
In fact, anyone so disposed has every right to cite this scientific research to support their own NON-SCIENTIFIC ideological or, yes, I'll say the word, religious belief.
They are as within their rights to do that as materialist-atheists of a scientistic kind were to cite the clearly unsupportable claim that life arose through random-chance in the absence of intelligent design. And, in fact, I don't think it's any random chance that has made such febrile neo-atheists as Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins opponents of these new findings in science because it is obvious that they are supportive of a conclusion that can't be a part of science, in favor of intelligent design.
I haven't read the admirable James Shapiro on any speculation (and it would be speculation for all the reasons I stated earlier this week) about the original organism that would not have obtained any such cognition from the inert chemicals that composed its body by random chance. Any such cognitive ability in that original organism would have had to have come from somewhere, I don't think atoms and molecules show much in the way of making change within themselves to promote their well-being and reproduction. Well, if you want to get into inorganic crystals as an inorganic model of such behavior, you're going to open up a can of worms I don't think you'll like the results of in any way - especially if you're one of those sci-ranger-pseudo-skeptics who love to mock believers in "woo."
In terms of my original claim that science can know nothing of the origin of life on Earth, any claim that the first organism that organized out of non-living molecules randomly placed by chance into a lipid surrounded bubble had the intelligence to do such things as reproduce the entire structure through some panpsychic characteristic of atoms and molecules will, then, be faced with the problem of the origin of the consciousness of atoms and molecules and where it came from as well a accounting for a, I suppose, "higher structure" of consciousness comprised of lower-level consciousness, either its existence or what comprises it or its meta-level functioning.
Since panpsychism has become fashionable and been adopted by some of the more philosophically aware materialists, I have had to wonder how they could possibly identify such consciousness, such intelligence so radically different than the animal intelligence we experience as consciousness and which any observing human being with the intelligence to sense it in animals, as consciousness so as to have any notion of how it worked in the ways they proposed. Keeping in mind that consciousness as we know and experience it has never been defined or well understood, in itself. In fact, many of their allies among materialists claim that consciousness is an illusion, not being astute enough to understand they are explaining away consciousness by saying it's a state of consciousness. And some of the worst of those are professional philosophers, themselves. Materialists are possibly the most inept practitioners of what is the most decadent academic pose in the history of human thought.
I said that a belief in intelligent design could not be science. I wasn't diminishing the intellectual status of such a belief by doing that, science is not the be-all and end-all of all high level intellectual representation of reality except in those specialized areas in which it can be done honestly and successfully. And science is only successful or reputable to the extent it is done that way. That is so true that vast areas of academic science, all of the so-called behavioral and social science, most of what has, so far, been granted the academic status as evolutionary science, most of cosmology, are instances of those professionally identified as scientists pretending that science can go beyond where science can go in order to pretend it can come up with scientific knowledge about things that cannot be treated scientifically, as of now. You can see the results of that whenever previously claimed scientific knowledge that gains currency is then rapidly or more slowly overturned, often entirely, often dramatically, often exposing the short-cuts to such a status, error or, not rarely enough to be insignificant in this part of my argument, outright fraud that is exposed. Modern academia is too often a shit-show only not usually as dangerously so as the shit-show that the law, politics and journalism are. All of this leads me to the conclusion that modernism is a failed project (as Marilynne Robinson has said) which needs NOT TO RETREAT TO SOME AS UNSUCCESSFUL AND DEAD OR DYING PAST but to go on more honestly, more humbly and more carefully to preserve and respect life.
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