IT WAS NEVER MORE THAN A CULT:

The Social Turn: Psychoanalysis at an inflection point (Maggie Doherty, April 2025, Harpers)

[I] was in New York mainly to investigate rumors I’d heard about major changes afoot in the American psychoanalytic community. Psychoanalysis, I’d heard, was modernizing. APsA was opening up to the broader world. There was a push to bring in new members, as well as a rising tide of psychoanalytic work that sought to make analysis more accessible to and effective for people of different stripes. I wanted to understand what these changes meant for clinicians and patients and whether they were being resisted. What would it take for psychoanalysis to change?

APsA may have an iron hold on the profession, but it has a small fist, I thought, as I counted the people milling about on the hotel’s second floor. It was Thursday, the convention’s third day but only the first with a full slate of panels and discussions, and there were perhaps fifty people present before the afternoon sessions. The crowd seemed old, strikingly so; I saw a lot of gray hair and sensible shoes and the kind of funky jewelry worn by women of a certain age. According to their name tags, many attendees hailed from a few coastal cities: Boston, San Francisco, New York. Almost every person I saw was white. There was a small book exhibit next to a poster display that reminded me of a high school science fair. Representatives from the mental-health treatment center Austen Riggs, advertising in-patient treatment in the Berkshires (more than $70,000 for six weeks), had set up shop just a few steps away.

The sleepy atmosphere, the sparse crowd: it was hard to believe that psychoanalysis had once been central to American culture. From the aftermath of World War II through the mid-Sixties, analysis was seen as a reliable treatment for mental illness. Psychoanalysts sat on the boards of medical schools and chaired departments of psychiatry. Psychoanalytic researchers received government funding. A rosy portrait of the psychoanalyst appeared in the press; journalists themselves entered treatment. The historian Nathan G. Hale Jr. calls this time the golden age of psychoanalysis.

But the golden age didn’t last. In the Sixties, psychoanalysis came under attack from feminists, as well as from advocates of community mental-health services who derided the practice as a luxury for the well-off. Meanwhile, a new generation of physicians and psychiatrists were turning away from psychoanalysis—particularly with the development of what would later be called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which was evidence-based and promised concrete results within a set time frame. By the late Seventies and early Eighties, insurance companies largely excluded psychoanalytic treatment on the grounds that it wasn’t evidence-based, and the majority of analysands had to pay out-of-pocket. In 1980, the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders purged its pages of psychoanalytic theory, explicitly bringing American psychiatry into a post-psychoanalytic era that was more focused on “biological” explanations and cures, like drugs. Soon pharmaceutical companies began promising patients that their depression or anxiety could be treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and by the end of the century, mainstream American psychoanalysis could be said to be on the decline—and in crisis.

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.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Footprints Reveal Two Early Human Species Walked the Same Lakeshore in Kenya 1.5 Million Years Ago (Sarah Kuta, 12/02/24, Smithsonian)

Their footprints, made within hours or days of each other, provide the first direct, physical evidence that multiple early human species coexisted in the same habitat, according to a new study published last week in the journal Science.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Philosophical Dead Ends: John Dupré reviews Richard Dawkins’s “The Genetic Book of the Dead” and Sara Imari Walker’s “Life as No One Knows It.” (John Dupré, November 30, 2024, LA Review of Books)

First, Dawkins remains, loosely speaking, a genetic determinist. I say “loosely speaking” because, of course, he does not believe that genes are sufficient to produce an organism. DNA alone in a test tube does not somehow turn into an elephant or an orchid. But Dawkins does take genes to be what matters. The additional necessary resources—oxygen to breathe, parental care, and so on—are background conditions normally sufficient to allow the genes to do their causal work. A crucial consequence of this is that development doesn’t matter for evolution. If the phenotype is fully inscribed in the genes, then it makes sense to think of evolution as ultimately a sequence of genomes competing with one another. The phenotypes are proxies for the genomes that determine them.

But life is not like that. Development is complex and multifactorial. Various nongenetic factors—e.g., cultural or epigenetic (non-sequence-based features of genomes), which may have their own distinct evolutionary trajectories—play a role.

AND THAT’S HOW THE LEOPARD GOT ITS SPOTS…:

Coyotes have the face muscles for that ‘sad-puppy’ look (Susan Milius, 10/01/24, Science News)

Coyotes turn out to have face muscles that look capable of making that big-eyed, sad-puppy face that dogs have used to melt human hearts for eons.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS:

Richard Dawkins on reverse engineering evolution’s optimal beauty (Richard Dawkins, 9/17/24, Big Think)

Reverse engineering assumes that the object facing us had a purpose in the mind of a competent designer, a purpose that can be guessed. The reverse engineer sets up a hypothesis as to what a sensible designer might have had in mind, then checks the mechanism to see if it fits the hypothesis. Reverse engineering works well for animal bodies as well as for man-made machines. The fact that the latter were deliberately designed by conscious engineers while the former were designed by unconscious natural selection makes surprisingly little difference…

Sublime. Dawkins has always been a self-parody.

THERE ARE NO SPOTTED OR BARRED OWLS, JUST OWLS:

Hybrids between two species can produce “swarms” that flourish (RICHARD PALLARDY, 7/30/2024, Ars Technica)

When two related species overlap geographically, they may form what are called “hybrid zones.” Some of the most obvious hybrid zones occur at the boundaries of divergent ecosystems. A plant species adapted to one soil type may exchange genes with a related plant adapted to another, and their offspring thus develop a population that thrives in an intermediate area with characteristics of both soil types.

These hybrid zones are often quite stable over time, with insignificant introgression, or breeding back, to the parent populations. That’s because the genes that serve the organisms in the hybrid zone may not be particularly useful to those outside of it, so they do not spread more widely.

Sometimes, however, hybridization events become something more. They turn into swarms. The first instance of the term “hybrid swarm” occurred in 1926 in a Nature article about New Zealand flora.

“As far as biologically defining the difference between that zone and a swarm, I’ve been struggling to find a nice, clean definition,” Fant said.

“A hybrid swarm is the ultimate erosion of two species into some other thing that’s a combination of both,” suggested Scott A. Taylor, an associate professor at the University of Colorado who has worked on hybridization in chickadees.

Sic transit species.

MORE TURTLES!:

Scientists unveil ‘missing’ law of nature in landmark discovery (Harriet Brewis,

In a paper published in the PNAS journal on 16 October, a multidisciplinary team from some of the US’s top institutes and universities, unveiled a new law claiming to do just that.

In a nutshell, their law states that evolution is not limited to life on Earth, it also occurs in other massively complex systems – from planets to atoms.
This means that these systems naturally “evolve” to states of greater diversity, and complexity.

In other words, the researchers found evolution to be a common feature of the natural world’s complex systems which, according to the Carnegie Institution for Science, comprise the following characteristics:

“They are formed from many different components, such as atoms, molecules, or cells, that can be arranged and rearranged repeatedly.”

They are subject to “natural processes that cause countless different configurations to be formed.”

And only a small fraction of these configurations survive via a process of natural selection called “selection for function”.

According to the researchers, regardless of whether the system is living or nonliving, when a new configuration works and function improves, evolution occurs.

Shorter nutshell: stuff that works works.

PITY THE POOR DARWINISTS:

Hybrid ‘Brolar Bears’ Could Spread Through The Arctic as The Planet Warms (CARLY CASSELLA, 11/17/22, Science Alert)

In 2006, a hunter in the Canadian Arctic shot a bear that didn’t look like the others. DNA testing would later confirm the animal was actually part grizzly, part polar bear.

In the years since, ‘pizzlies’ or ‘brolar bears’ have popped up more and more in North America, and now researchers in Siberia are warning the same could happen elsewhere in the icy north.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Five Shocking Animal Hybrids That Truly Exist in Nature, From Narlugas to Grolar Bears to Coywolves (Carlyn Kranking, March 21, 2024, Smithsonian)

As humans, even we are the result of hybridization, as all people of non-African descent derive about 1 to 4 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals, while African people have about 0.5 percent Neanderthal DNA.