NOTHING EVER SPECIATES:

A Mathematician’s View of Evolution: There are at least four fundamental problems with Darwinian evolution as an answer to the origins and complexity of life on earth. (Granville Sewell, February 8, 2025, American Spectator)

Problem 3.  It is widely believed that Darwin’s theory of natural selection of random replication errors (mutations) explains evolution. But in fact, Darwin’s implausible theory becomes more implausible with every new biological and biochemical discovery.

In 1960 Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote “It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly…. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic and almost always large.”

If you think about what gradual transitions between major groups of animals would have looked like you will understand why we generally don’t see them in the fossil record. Gradual development of the new organs or new systems of organs that gave rise to new orders, classes, and phyla would require the development of new but not yet useful features. The development of new organs through their initial useless stages obviously cannot be explained by natural selection, since new features present no selective advantage before they are useful.

Features which are useless until they are well developed, or almost perfect, are said to be “irreducibly complex,” a term that was introduced by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box.  Irreducibly complex features and processes are ubiquitous in living things, especially at the microscopic level, as Behe documented in great detail in this now-classic book.

In fact, the development — gradual or not — of new organs or other irreducibly complex features through their useless stages could only be guided by a process with foresight, able to think ahead and envision their future uses. In other words, a mind. Indeed, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose is the title of a 2019 book by Brazilian chemist and ID proponent Marcos Eberlin, which carries the endorsement of three Nobel prize winners.

The first part of the video Why Evolution is Different has further documentation, including a New York Times News Service report on a 1980 meeting of  “nearly all of the leading evolutionists” at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History,  for the assertion that major new features generally do not appear gradually in the fossil record and could not be explained by natural selection even if they did. Here is a segment from the report on the 1980 meeting:

Darwin, however, knew he was on shaky ground in extending natural selection to account for differences between major groups of organisms. The fossil record of his day showed no gradual transitions between such groups, but he suggested that further fossil discoveries would fill the missing links.

“The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist,” declared Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Eldridge reminded the meeting of what many fossil hunters have recognized as they trace the history of a species through successive layers of ancient sediments. Species simply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largely unchanged for a few million years and then disappear. There are very few examples — some say none — of one species shading gradually into another.

A 2022 article in The Guardian, “Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?”  retells the traditional Darwinian story for how eyes evolved and then says

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.  For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place…

And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

In 2004, Michael Behe and David Snoke published a paper in Protein Science whose conclusions are summarized on p. 242 of Steve Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt:

[T]hey assessed how long it would typically take to generate two or three or more coordinated mutations.  They determined that generally the probability of multiple mutations arising in close (functionally relevant) coordination to each other was “prohibitively” low — it would likely take an immensely long time, typically far longer than the age of the earth.

This explains why Darwinists have always insisted that evolutionary progress must be assumed to have always been very gradual, despite the evidence that it was not.

THEY CAN’T WITHSTAND hIS KISS:

Tech Broligarchs Want Jesus Out of the Way (Russell Moore, 2/03/25, Christianity Today))

“God” is no problem in this view of reality. After all, the word God can be made abstract and even algebraic. Albert Einstein suggesting that “God does not play dice with the universe” implicated an impersonal structure, a logic, not the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Spinoza’s “God” will never summon a person before a judgment seat. The words God or religion can be used as stand-ins for the very sort of self-deification the tech-bro ideology and all its successors demand.

Jesus, on the other hand, is not easily dismissed. Once he is heard—not as a theoretical avatar giving authority to some ideology, but for the actual words he spoke, the actual gospel he delivered—the ambitions of every would-be “master of the universe” stand exposed.

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov said he wanted Jesus silenced because the Jesus of the Bible didn’t “understand” human nature: that what people really want is the filling of appetites and the spectacles of distraction. Against the Inquisitor’s diatribe, though, Jesus, as with Pilate, simply stands there, with a look that pierces through all the manipulations of a mechanistic view of the universe.

The digital view of humanity cannot fit with the vision of James Madison and the framers of the American constitutional order. Utopian revolutionaries have always offered some version of “One must break a few eggs to make some omelets,” regardless of the price of actual eggs at the moment. But behind that utopianism is always a theology—and the theology can co-opt almost everything. Christianity can be co-opted by a digital utopianism, but only by silencing Jesus.

Yet Jesus is not easily silenced. The universe is no simulation. It is created and held together not by an algorithm but by a Word. And this Word is no abstraction to be decoded but a person, one who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

A million different Babels lie in the ruins of history, and behind them a million different Nimrods, all of whom would storm the limits of mortality and of accountability to create simulations of themselves and of their rule. They are all gone, and they cannot be rebooted.

A SENSE OF SEENNESS:

Reality Is in the Eye of the Beholder (Shimon Edelman, from Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths, MIT Press Reader)

If different species, or even different individuals belonging to the same species, inhabit different perceptual worlds, what can we know about what the real world is like? Clearly enough to make action possible; apart from that, not much. Amazingly, the more basic a question about that real world seems, the more difficult it is to get a definitive answer to it. Is it dark at night? The sense in which it is for us is of little concern to a bat, and of no concern to a mole. Is air thick? Not really to us, but sufficiently so for a swallow to push against during its aerial acrobatics. Is water wet? Not to a duck or a water strider. In the face of such differences, it seems silly to insist that our perceptual world is somehow privileged or that what we perceive is how things really are.

How things look and feel depends not only on who is doing the looking and feeling, but also on what action or other purpose it serves, as well as on the perceiver’s experiential history (and therefore on memory) and bodily and emotional state. I may see a rock outcropping encountered on a hike as a human face or as a battering ram, depending on where my mind was wandering as I was walking up to it (arguably, the best hiking experience requires that the hiker practice just seeing instead of seeing as).

When I am hungry, a mountain track that I am facing looks steeper than right after a meal. The prospect of jumping at six o’clock in the morning into the indoor pool, in which the water is kept cool to prevent lap swimmers from overheating, feels discomforting to different degrees, depending on whether it is summer or winter outside, as I found out, having been doing this three times a week for many years. Luckily, it helps to think about other matters while swimming. For example, anticipating how the chapter that I am working on is going to end literally warms me up: It distracts me from the initial feeling of cold and I also swim faster, so that it takes me a couple of minutes less to do my usual 3,200 yards.

As we find ourselves compelled to doubt the very notion of objective truth about what the world is like, can science help? Yes, as long as we don’t expect it to do the impossible. Whatever the world is “really” like, evolution has been clearly successful — in an endless variety of strange and beautiful ways — in coming up with effective means of dealing with it. Science, which operates on much the same principles of variation and selection, can be at least equally successful. But evolution has no use for questions of ultimate truth and scientists too are supposed to shun them. In some disciplines, they have learned to do so. Is the electron really a wave or a particle? Quantum mechanics, an epitome of theoretical and practical success in physics, rightly refuses such questions.

The complexity of the human brain greatly exceeds that of any other physical system that we know of, so that in perception science it is even more important not to waste time on arguing about absolutes. What color is this banana? Purple (it’s my favorite variety from Costa Rica), but there is no matter of objective fact about this observation, because color has no physical definition: It is entirely the construct of the observer’s visual system in its interaction with the environment. At least as far as color is concerned, things are neither as they seem, nor otherwise.

There is a philosophical tradition out there that holds this — the essential emptiness of all things — to be an ultimate truth in its own right; indeed, the only ultimate truth.

OUGHT TO GO WITHOUT SAYING…:

The Rise of Main Character Energy in Worship (Taylor Berry, Jan. 30th, 2025, Relevant)

We all know worship is meant to be an act of surrender—a moment where we take the spotlight off ourselves and fix our eyes on God. But can we be honest? Lately, it seems like worship music has embraced a little too much “Main Character Energy.”

Instead of singing to God, many modern worship songs feel like we’re singing about us—our feelings, our victories and our plans. The shift from “You are worthy” to “I am brave” may be subtle, but it raises a critical question: Are we glorifying God, or are we glorifying how God makes us feel?

…it’s not about you.

“GRAB YOUR THINGS, I’VE COME TO TAKE YOU HOME”:

My Final Days on the Maine Coast: Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, a writer meditates on life, death, and beauty from his small seaside cottage down east. (Joseph Monninger, February 2025, Down East)

I count on his visits and keep two sets of binoculars nearby, wanting to have a pair within reach wherever I happen to be on my two acres of land in Pembroke, a small community that once took its living from the sea. I am aware that the eagle has become something of a project for me. My son, when he calls from his home in New Hampshire, asks if I have seen the eagle that day, and I know that he is asking out of kindness, out of an acknowledgement of my age and the emptiness of my daily calendar, and yet I can’t help playing my part and relating to him the itinerary of the eagle’s visit. Yes, I tell him, the eagle came early this morning, stayed for nearly 15 minutes, and yes, it was on that perch on The Eagle Tree, the name I have for the bird’s favorite pine. Last year, a storm took down the tallest pine overlooking the water, and I worried that the eagle would find another place to rest while the crows and gulls hectored him. But the eagle has taken to the new tree, and so it is a safe, light topic that my son and I can explore without any of the weightier subjects that circle around us. We both know that this beautiful land overlooking this vibrant estuary is the place I am making my last stand. I live here with stage-four lung cancer, each motion, however minimal, underlined by a dry cough, my fist to my lips, my heart and head and breath paused for a moment while I wonder if and how I will continue.

So the eagle is useful and welcome. It is understood now that I am becoming mist, the ghost of my youthful life, an old man who swims in the sea and rivers to bathe, a rough birch cane in my left hand to steady myself and sometimes to help me stand. I have chosen to live this way, to live near the sea without running water, to surround myself with simple beauty. My days have been emptied of all fanfare and complication. I play chess on the computer, read great gulps of books, nap, and study the weather both in the sky and in my chest. I watch the Red Sox replay in the early morning, at first light, and find I have not given up rooting for our beloved nine.