Monkeys SETI

8/9/2019 Monkeys SETI

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The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth

Dr Stephen D Unwin (phd theoretical physics)

Theory:An explanation for some phenomenon that is based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning.

earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/glossary.php3

hypothesis: a tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true

would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing

becomes a scientific theory";

An extremely well-substantiated explanation of some aspects of the natural world that incorporates

facts, laws, predictions, and tested hypotheses. (Eg, Einstein's Theory of Gravitation, 1916)

www.nmsr.org/wrkshp9.htm

A scientific theory is an established and experimentally verified fact or collection of facts about the

world. Unlike the everyday use of the word theory, it is not an unproved idea, or just some theoreticalspeculation. The latter meaning of a 'theory' in science is called a hypothesis. -

http://www.whatislife.com/glossary/t.htm

a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted

knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena;

- http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=theory

compared to :

"The history of organic life is undemonstrable; we cannot prove a whole lot in evolutionary biology,and our findings will always be hypothesis. There is one true evolutionary history of life, and whether

we will actually ever know it is not likely. Most importantly, we have to think about questioning

underlying assumptions, whether we are dealing with molecules or anything else." Jeffrey H. Schwartz,Professor of Biological Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, February 9, 2007

------------------------

No-design is science while actual design is an untestable religious appeal to the supernatural.------------------------

The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and

dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. A Heavenly Master governs all the world as Sovereign

of the universe. We are astonished at Him by reason of His perfection, we honor Him and fall downbefore Him because of His unlimited power. From blind physical necessity, which is always and

everywhere the same, no variety adhering to time and place could evolve, and all variety of created

objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of itsoriginal Creator, Whom I call the Lord God.

Isaac Newton: Principia

--------------------------In the Conclusion, on page 136, Jones says Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs scientific experts

testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the

scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divinecreator [emphasis added]. I have not read the scientific experts testimony, and I wonder if Judge

Jones has slightly distorted what they said. If they said that the theory of evolution in no way conflicts

with the existence of a divine creator, then I must say that I find that claim to be disingenuous. The


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theory of evolution demolishes the best reason anyone has ever suggested for believing in a divine

creator. This does not demonstrate that there is no divine creator, of course, but only shows that if there

is one, it (He?) neednt have bothered to create anything, since natural selection would have taken care

of all that. Would the good judge similarly agree that when a defense team in a murder trial shows thatthe victim died of natural causes, that this in no way conflicts with the states contention that the death

in question had an author, the accused? Whats the difference? ~ Daniel Dennett

--------------------Creationists are disqualified from making a positive case, because science by definition is based upon

naturalism. The rules of science also disqualify any purely negative argumentation designed to dilute

the persuasiveness of the theory of evolution. Creationism is thus out of court and out of the classroom-before any consideration of evidence. Put yourself in the place of a creationist who has been silenced

by that logic, and you may feel like a criminal defendant who has just been told that the law does not

recognize so absurd a concept as "innocence." ~ Phillip Johnson

---------------Darwin did more to secularize the Western world than any other single thinker in history. ~ Niles

Eldredge

--------------The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your

ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast

assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased:"You're nothing but a pack of neurons." This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today

that it can truly be called astonishing. (p. 3) -Francis Crick (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The

Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Charles Scribners Sons

---------------

I can't answer with a simple yes or no. I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist.

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many differentlanguages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child

dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it

seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universemarvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited

minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's

pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the firstphilosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things. Einstein - Denis Brian,

Einstein, A Life, New York, 1996, p.128

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able torecognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they

quote me for the support of such views." Einstein

--------------

"The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at

by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order." Sir F.Hoyle

----------------------

More disquieting still is Professor D. M. S. Watson's defense. "Evolution itself," he wrote, "is acceptedby zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or... can be proved by logically coherent

evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible." Has it

come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but


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simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice. Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God? ~

C.S. Lewis

--------------------

Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented. ~ William Provine----------------

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet,

because you're being had. - Michael Crichton - Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD

from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological

Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He has taught courses in anthropology atCambridge University and writing at MIT.

----------------------------------

"Modern scientific theory compels us to think of the creator as working outside time and space, which

are part of his creation, just as the artist is outside his canvas. 'Non in tempore, sed cum tempre, finxitDeus mendum'."

Sir James Jeans: The Mysterious Universe. NY MacMilllan 1930

---------------------------------Darwin (1881) wrote in a letter, "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of

man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at

all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictionsin such a mind?"

-------------

Richard Dawkins once wrote that it appears almost as if "the human brain is specifically designed tomisunderstand Darwinism."

------------------

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the

entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."- Robert Wilensky

In 2003, scientists at Paignton Zoo and the University of Plymouth, in Devon in England reported thatthey had left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques for a month; not

only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they started by

attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it.---------

Shapiro quotes Richard Dawkins on his worship of the first self-replicating molecule and says "[a]t

some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator."

But, as Shapiro explains, the real explanation is not nearly so simple:

Unfortunately, complications soon set in. DNA replication cannot proceed without the assistance of

a number of proteins--members of a family of large molecules that are chemically very different fromDNA. Proteins, like DNA, are constructed by linking subunits, amino acids in this case, together to

form a long chain. Cells employ twenty of these building blocks in the proteins that they make,

affording a variety of products capable of performing many different tasks--proteins are the handymenof the living cell. Their most famous subclass, the enzymes, act as expeditors, speeding up chemical

processes that would otherwise take place too slowly to be of use to life. The above account brings to

mind the old riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? DNA holds the recipe for proteinconstruction. Yet that information cannot be retrieved or copied without the assistance of proteins.

Which large molecule, then, appeared first in getting life started--proteins (the chicken) or DNA (the

egg)?


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(Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, February 12, 2007)

Shapiro also takes aim at the hypothesis that Miller-Urey type chemistry may have led to life's buildingblocks meteorites:

By extrapolation of these results, some writers have presumed that all of life's building could beformed with ease in Miller-type experiments and were present in meteorites and other extraterrestrial

bodies. This is not the case. A careful examination of the results of the analysis of several meteorites

led the scientists who conducted the work to a different conclusion: inanimate nature has a bias towardthe formation of molecules made of fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus shows

no partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of life. (When larger carbon-containing

molecules are produced, they tend to be insoluble, hydrogen-poor substances that organic chemists call

tars.) I have observed a similar pattern in the results of many spark discharge experiments.

(Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, February 12, 2007)

---------------------I'm a Darwinist because I believe the only alternatives are Lamarckism or God ... ,

- Richard Dawkins

--------------James L. Powell, professor of geology and the former director and president of the L.A. County

Museum of Natural History. In a video urging scientists to tell the public what's what regarding

intelligent design, he makes this ahem, incisive argument against intelligent design (HT: PaulNelson):

We have to say that if creationism is right and if there is an intelligent designer, then almost

everything else we know about science is wrong. Then your flu vaccine wouldn't work, your carwouldn't start, there was no Hiroshima, and on and on and on. http://telicthoughts.com/professor-of-

geology-cars-disprove-intelligent-design/

How did this guy get a degree!?!?!? - GH-----------------------------

"The formation within geological time of a human body," Kurt Godel remarked to the logician Hao

Wang, "by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distributionof elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into

its components." Godel

--------------------

On January 12th, 1982, Sir Fred Hoyle delivered the Omni Lecture at the Royal Institution, London,entitled "Evolution from Space," ... In it he discussed the overwhelming improbability of getting the

enzymes needed for even the simplest form of life to function by chance.

... The difference between an intelligent ordering, whether of words, fruit boxes, amino acids, or the

Rubik cube, and merely random shufflings can be fantastically large, even as large as a number that

would fill the whole volume of Shakespeare's plays with its zeros. So if one proceeds directly andstraightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific

opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be

the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering thisissue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true. (27-

28)

---------------------------


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Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods

worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no

ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent. ~ William Provine

[Darwinss notebooks] include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose

something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism the

postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

There is indeed one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejectionof creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and

under which they marched. When Hull claimed that "the Darwinians did not totally agree with each

other, even over essentials", he overlooked one essential on which all these Darwinians agreed.

Nothing was more essential for them than to decide whether evolution is a natural phenomenon orsomething controlled by God. The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of

natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians

together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwins theories. ~ Ernst Mayr-----------

Evolution by natural selection...has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover

up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and atworst not even wrong. Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2005)

----------------

Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searchesouter space for confirming material evidence?

Answer: A scientist.

Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches

inner space for confirming material evidence?

Answer: A religious nut.

---------------------

Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors ofanything else. ~ Colin Patterson

--------------------

Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at the University

of Oxford, and a science writer and broadcaster:"I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the

only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and

airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed aredivided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really

designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at

all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decidewhether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

(Phillip Johnsons comments): So birds, like airliners and submarines, and unlike rocks and mounains,"look designed" Then it cannot be unreasonable to judge that they really are designed, unless there is

positive proof that Darwinian natural selection can and did do the job. There isn't. The designing

power of the Darwinian mechanism is always presumed, never demonstrated.


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-----------------

Richard Lewontin- Harvard geneticist:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of itsfailure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the

scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a

commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel usto accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by

our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts

that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to theuninitiated. Moreover the materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

--

Scientists, like others, sometimes tell deliberate lies, because they believe that small lies can serve big

truths. -Lewontin, R.C., The Inferiority Complex, New York Review of Books, 22 October 1981, p. 13.

----------------"Galileos conflict with the church could have probably been avoided if he had been endowed with less

passion and more diplomacy; but long before that conflict, he had incurred the implacable hostility of

the orthodox Aristotelians who held key positions at the Italian universities. Religion and politicaloppression play only an incidental part in the history of science; its erratic course and recurrent crises

are caused by internal factors. One of the conspicuous handicaps is the conservatism of the scientific

mind in its corporate aspect. The collective matrix of a science at a given time is determined by a kindof establishment, which includes universities, learned societies, and, more recently, the editorial offices

of technical journals. Like other establishments, they are consciously or unconsciously bent on

preserving the status quo partly because unorthodox innovations are a threat to their authority, but

also because of a deeper fear that that their laboriously erected intellectual edifice might collapse underthe impact. Corporate orthodoxy has been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Galileo, to Harvey,

Darwin and Freud; throughout the centuries its phalanxes have sturdily defended habit against

originality." (Koestler, The Act of Creation, 1969, p. 239)---------------------

The truth is that once you embark on Darwinian nihilism there is no resting place. If there is no point in

life, everything in the end has to go duty, laws, arts, letters, society and you are left with nothing,except 'proceeding'.

Paul Johnson (The Spectator, 23 April 2005)

-----------------

The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question...- Richard Dawkins, the God Delusion (p. 58-59) (2006)

"Well... it could come about in the following way: it could be that uh, at some earlier time somewhere

in the universe a civilization e-evolved... by probably by some kind of Darwinian means to a very veryhigh level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto... perhaps this... this planet.

Um, now that is a possibility. And uh, an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it's possible that you

might find evidence for that if you look at the um, at the detail... details of our chemistry molecularbiology you might find a signature of some sort of designer." R. Dawkins to Ben Stein in Expelled.

----------------

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibita vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of

elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and

our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is


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reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would

formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their

kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly

injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads tothe degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so

ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

[Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871 edition), vol. I, p. 168); emphasis added]

"[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will

almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."[Darwin, Descent (1871), vol. I, p. 201.]

--------------

ENV editor, Anika Smith, has a delightful column in the SPU Falcon newspaper titled Beware of

'Darwin Day'. In describing some of the more humorous elements of Darwin Day celebrations (carols,Darwin look-alike contests and even an incredible, edible tree of life) Smith notes the holiday's familiar

trappings.

If you're wondering what a secular humanist does to commemorate such an occasion, it turns out that

these particular humanists stand on street corners and hand out leaflets about evolution in an attempt to

reach passers-by.

In Victoria, B.C., a philosophy of religion professor organized a Darwin Day celebration for his

students where they decked the halls with humanist style. Participants decorated an evolution tree,exchanged Darwin cards and even sang evolution carols.

If this sounds familiar to you, that's because it was designed that way. This celebration, like so many

others, was styled as a "light-hearted satire" of Christmas. Had the celebration taken place in a culturewith a different religious history, such as Turkey, it might look something more like the Feast of

Sacrifice.

-----------------------"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men

equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is

no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man."-----------------------

IOW [in other words], if its unconstitutional for students to be informed that science doesnt know

how life began, or that many of lifes forms and functions apparently dont arise by chance, or that the

appearance of design in nature might not be illusion, then they cant be informed that science makesdeities superfluous, that biologists are mostly metaphysical materialists who do not believe there is

creative agency, or (as Dawkins insists) science proves there are no deities. - telic thoughts blog - joy

----------------In Johnsons formulation, which I like, atheism/materialism, and its creation story, Darwinism, serve to

answer these questions. My editorial comment is that the answers provided by this "religion" represent

inescapable philosophical nihilism:

Where we came from: Chance and necessity.

Where we are going: Eternal oblivion.Our place in the grand scheme of things: There is no grand scheme of things.

- Gil Dodgen

------------------


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Writing an editorial in the magazine Science, the frontispiece of the prestigious National Association

for the Advancement of Science, Stephen Jay Gould launched a direct attack on religion thereby

exposing the true religious nature of Darwinism. After quoting Psalm 8 "Thou has made him a little

lower than the angels...thou madest him to have dominion...thou has put all things under his feet."Gould went on to state, "Darwin removed this keystone of false comfort more than a century ago, but

many people still believe that they cannot navigate this vale of tears without such a crutch." Ending the

article, Gould admonished his readers, "Let us praise this evolutionary nexus, a far more statelymansion for the human soul than any pretty or parochial comfort ever conjured by our swollen

neurology to obscure the source of our physical being, or to deny the natural substrate for our separate

and complementary spiritual quest."-----------------

as a matter of fact, creationism should be discriminated against. No advocate of such

propaganda should be trusted to teach science classes or administer science programs anywhere or

under any circumstances. Moreover, if any are now doing so, they should be dismissed. Patterson,J.W., Do scientists and scholars discriminate unfairly against creationists? Journal of the National

Center for Science Education, p. 19, Fall (Autumn) 1984.

----------------The only appropriate response should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the

public firing of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy, far-right

politiciansI say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. Its time for scientists to break out thesteel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. - PZ

Meyers UoM

---------------------------------"If we've defined science such that it cannot get to the true answer, we've got a pretty lame definition of

science."

Douglas Axe

--------------------"There is no God and Richard Dawkins is his prophet" - Dembski

-------------------

"Complexity kills, it sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test."- R. Ozzie - MS director.

---------

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equationafter equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

- Nikola Tesla

---------------------

to avoid saying how far I believe in materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talentwhich are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock. - Darwin - private notes

-----------------

they still do not know how many species exist. Estimates range from 3 million to 100 million or evenmore.

Taxonomists--biologists who specialize in identifying and classifying life on the planet--have namedapproximately 1.7 million species so far. Each year, about 13,000 more species are added to the list of

known organisms

...Published in 1995, the United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment is the most ambitious such

undertaking to date. The document proposes a "working estimate" of 13.6 million species on Earth.

------------------------


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What sort of idiot wants to prove he came from a monkey? - dog

Hard to see how we could improve further isn't it? - star headed sea creature

- Creature Comforts - british evo question clay animation - Aardman

-----------Future of Darwinism:

History will ultimately judge neo-darwinisim as "a minor twentieth-century religious sect within thesprawling religious persuation of Anglo-Saxon biology." - Lynn Margulis - professor of biology,

University of Massachusetts

"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied,

will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very

flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."

-Malcolm Muggeridge (world famous journalist and philosopher), Pascal Lectures, University ofWaterloo, Ontario, Canada.

"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story theyare telling may be the GREATEST HOAX ever." Dr. T. N. Tahmisian, Physiologist. Atomic Energy

Commission. As quoted in: Evolution and the Emperor's New Clothes, 3D Enterprises Limited

"I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science."

-Dr. Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 422.

(Note: Lovtrup is an evolutionist, albeit not an "orthodox" one.)------------

Natural selection is not random, but it does not create anything; it only throws stuff out. Natural

selection is a garbage disposal. Garbage disposals dont engineer anything.

- Gil Dodgen-----------------

A. Lunn summed up the curious faith of the evolutionist as follows: "Faith is the substance of fossils

hoped for, the evidence of links unseen." (The Collapse of Evolution, by Dr. Scott Huse)------------

Post by Elizabeth Craig, of Kansas Citizens for Science, about their strategy to defeat the attempt to

open the teaching of evolution to critical analysis.

http://www.kcfs.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000017

posted February 10, 2005 06:53 PMFebruary 10, 2005 07:53 PM

Pat,

I admire your attitude. I feel the same way. However, the BOE answers to no one. They have no reasonto resign. They are in the cat-bird seat, they have all the power, and they will do what they want to do.

My strategy at this point is the same as it was in 1999: notify the national and local media about what's

going on and portray them in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists,ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc.

There may no way to head off another science standards debacle, but we can sure make them look likeasses as they do what they do.

Our target is the moderates who are not that well educated about the issues, most of whom probably are


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theistic evolutionists. There is no way to convert the creationists.

----------

Here, for example, is the concluding paragraph of Larry Laudan's famous article, "The Demise of the

Demarcation Problem:"

Through certain vagaries of history, ...we have managed to conflate two quite distinct questions:

What makes a belief well founded (or heuristically fertile)? And what makes a belief scientific? Thefirst set of questions is philosophically interesting and possibly even tractable; the second question is

both uninteresting and, judging by its checkered past, intractable. If we would stand up and be counted

on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like "pseudo-science" and "unscientific" from ourvocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us.... Insofar as our concern is

to protect ourselves and our fellows from the cardinal sin of believing what we wish were so rather than

what there is substantial evidence for (and surely that is what most forms of "quackery" come down to),

then our focus should be squarely on the empirical and conceptual credentials for claims about theworld. The "scientific" status of those claims is irrelevant.(16)

Surely Laudan is on the right track. For example, whether mutation and selection can create complexorgans like wings and eyes is a question to be resolved by evidence. To insist that belief in the creative

power of natural selection is "scientific," and doubt on the subject is inherently "religious," or even an

instance of the thought crime known as "creationism," is simply to try to prejudice the inquiry with atendentious use of labels. Perhaps those who attribute creation to a Creator are committing what

Laudan called "the cardinal sin of believing what they wish were so rather than what there is substantial

evidence for." On the other hand, perhaps this is still more true of Darwinists, who are so eager tobelieve on slight evidence that natural selection can do all the work of creation.

The points in dispute can only be settled by an unbiased examination of the evidence. Those who have

confidence in their evidence and their logic do not appeal to prejudice, nor do they insist uponimposing rules of discourse that allow only one position to receive serious consideration, nor do they

use vague and shifting terminology to distract attention from genuine points of difficulty. Still less do

they heap abuse and ridicule upon persons who want to raise questions about the evidence and thephilosophical assumptions that underly a theory. When an educational establishment has to resort to

tactics like that, you can be sure that some people are getting desperate. - Phillip Johnson

---------------http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1186 :

"Darwinists haven't figured out how to evolve irreducible complexity because irreducible complexity is

in principle impossible to evolve. Irreducible complexity is a fundamental falsfier of Darwinism."

The lack of testable step-by-step accounts of the evolution of irreducible complexity testifies to the fact

that, regardless of the state of who has published or said what, evolution fundamentally cannot evolveirreducible complexity.

Table 1. Ways Designers Act When Designing (Observations):(1) Take many parts and arrange them in highly specified and complex patterns which perform a

specific function.

(2) Rapidly infuse any amounts of genetic information into the biosphere, including large amounts,such that at times rapid morphological or genetic changes could occur in populations.

(3) 'Re-use parts' over-and-over in different types of organisms (design upon a common blueprint).

(4) Be said to typically NOT create completely functionless objects or parts (although we may


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sometimes think something is functionless, but not realize its true function).

Table 2. Predictions of Design (Hypothesis):

(1) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found.(2) Forms will be found in the fossil record that appear suddenly and without any precursors.

(3) Genes and functional parts will be re-used in different unrelated organisms.

(4) The genetic code will NOT contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless "junkDNA".

---------

Scientists are complaining that the new Dinosaur movie showsdinosaurs with lemurs, who didn't evolve for another million years.

They're afraid the movie will give kids a mistaken impression.

What about the fact that the dinosaurs are singing and dancing?

--Jay Leno---------

Athough all my training was peppered with fleeting references to Darwinist myths, all the useful stuff

in our training assumed design. Nothing in biology makes sense without ID. Evolutionary biologistsgenerally specialise in imagination, hand waving and a lot of talk.

The new field of systems biology is forcing the biologists back to school to study engineering. Why dowe need engineering to understand the results of Darwins simple idea? - a Medical Doc.

----------

Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society.This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that

demand a particular viewpoint.

...

Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until youhave re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much

misinformation exists in the supposed age of information. Climatologist Dr. Tim Ball - on global

warming.-------------

No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a

human myth. ...

Free will is not hard to give up, because it's a horribly destructive idea to our society. Free will is what

we use as an excuse to treat people like pieces of **** when they do something wrong in our society.

We say to the person, "you did something wrong out of your free will, and therefore we have thejustification for revenge all over your behind." We put people in prison, turning them into lousier

individuals than they ever were. This horrible system is based upon this idea of free will. - Dr. W. B.

Provine, evo bio prof, Cronell - 1994.************

El Hitcho says:

I would also suggest you take a look at canadian forces General Romeo D'allaire's "Shake hands withthe devil" book (The Rwanda massacres). Get a good idea of just how evil, devilish evil humans can

be. If it's all just genetic defect and biologically provoked then there is no "evil" in genocide at all -- it's

just another evo adaptation for the survival of the fittest.

The Moral Law exists. Morality is a question of conduct by free choice. No free choice = no possibility

of morality. Rocks don't have will => Rocks have no morality.


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Humans have free choice, volition or the ability of self-determination. Therefore they are moral agents.

All conscious beings with these attributes are moral agents. However, If there is no such thing as

ultimate moral law then there is no such thing as morality itself.

Therefore, if morality is a human invention or an evolutionary adaptation for mere survival purposes,

the moral law does not exist and nothing is either right or wrong.

"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled

alike.""If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake,

nothing is obligatory at all."

"The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or

a new primary colour in the spectrum..." - Lewis

What law is.

Law is a rule of action, and in its most extensive sense, it is applicable to all actions, whether of matteror mind.

Define Moral Law.1. Moral law is a rule of moral action.

2. It is the law of motive, and not of force.

3. Moral law is a rule, to which moral beings are under obligations to conform all their actions.4. ....

No being can make law.

1. God's existence and nature are necessary.

2. Moral law is that course of action which is in conformity with the laws of His being.3. It is, therefore, obligatory upon him.

4. God could make moral agents, but not moral law; for when they exist, this rule is law to them, and

would be, whether God willed it or not.5. Law is that course of action demanded by the nature and relations of moral beings.

*************************Suppose our body is lacking the CFTR gene (or it is not yet functional), which produces a trans-

membrane protein which regulates chloride ion transport across the cell membrane. Or suppose that it

is missing the RB gene on the 13th chromosome, whose job it is to identify abnormal tumour growth,

especially in a childs rapidly growing retina, and kill such tumours. If one tiny piece of the puzzle ismissing all the other thousands of functional genes become worthless, since the organism cannot

survive.

How sensitive is our human copy machine to error? The CFTP gene has 250,000 base pairs. Over 200

mutations have been described which lead to cystic fibrosis (CF). The most common mutation, -F508

at position 508 on the peptide chain involves the deletion of three nucleotides.[52] Three out of250,000 nucleotides are not copied correctly and the gene cannot function! It is simply not correct to

pretend that nature offers endless degrees of freedom to monkey around with the highly interdependent

and very sensitive machinery of cell duplication. Furthermore, as discussed above, time is the greatestenemy for evolutionary theory, since most mutations are recessive and for the time being non-lethal.

These accumulate from generation to generation and increase the genetic burden. R Truman.

-------------------


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Living things have by far the most compact information storage/retrieval system known. This stands to

reason if a microscopic cell stores as much information as several sets of Encyclopdia Britannica. To

illustrate further, the amount of information that could be stored in a pinheads volume of DNA is

staggering. It is the equivalent information content of a pile of paperback books 500 times as tall as thedistance from Earth to the moon, each with a different, yet specific content.

---------

"Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are notransitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems

of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least 'show a photo of the

fossil from which each type of organism was derived.' I will lay it on the linethere is not one suchfossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry

and descent are not applicable in the fossil record." Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist, British

Museum of Natural History, London "Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems," [1984], Master

Book Publishers: El Cajon CA, Fourth Edition, 1988, p89--------------

IF the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on

this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all ourpresent thoughts are mere accidents the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this

holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone elses. But if their

thoughts i.e., Materialism and Astronomy are mere accidental by-products, why should we believethem to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct

account of all the other accidents. Its like expecting the accidental shape taken by the splash when you

upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.C. S. Lewis

----------

'No-design is science while actual design is an untestable religious appeal to the supernatural.'

---------# Evolutionists do not fully understand their own theory and its incredible flexibility.

# Evolutionary theory is a structureless smorgasbord.

Berlinski---------

"[The cell is] essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals.

In terms of their basic biochemical design no living system can be thought of as being primitive orancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary

sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth." Dr. Michael Denton,A Theory in Crisis,

Adler and Adler, Bethesda, p. 250, 1986

---------"As the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the base

sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule. It is this

physical indeterminacy of the sequence that produces the improbability of any particular sequence andthereby enables it to have a meaninga meaning that has a mathematically determinate information

content." Michael Polanyi,"Lifes Irreducible Structure", Science 160:1308, 1968

---------"It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is

intelligence - an orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever

uttered - 'In the beginning, God.'" Dr. Arthur H. Compton,Nobel Laureate (Physics).---------

"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted

myself to a fantasy."


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Charles Darwin, Life and Letters, 1887, Vol. 2, p. 229

"I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science."

Charles Darwin,In a letter to Asa Gray, a Harvard professor of biology. Quoted in N.C. Gillespie,'Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation' (1979), p.2

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries,the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout

the

world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18.'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man

and

his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we

mayhope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro

or

Australian and the gorilla. Darwon - The Descent pf Man p. 98----------

"Paleontology (study of fossils) cannot be regarded other than as a hostile witness (against evolution).

"It is not possible to draw up a pedigree showing the descent of any species, living or extinct, from anancestor belonging to a different order. The earliest know fossils of each class and order are not half-

made or half-developed forms, but exhibit, fully developed, all the essential characteristics of their

class or order. . . .It is not possible to arrange a genealogical series of fossils proving that any series hasin the past undergone sufficient change to transform it into a member of another family.

All the changes proved by fossils to have taken place in animals are within the limits of the family."

In the book "IS EVOLUTION PROVED?" Douglas Dewar quoted Sir J. William Dawson (1820-

1899), F. R. S., of McGill University (Montreal), a trained geologist. Prof., Dawson said in his day:

"The evolutionist doctrine is itself one of the strangest phenomena of humanity. . . .that in our day asystem destitute of any shadow of proof. . . .should be accepted as a philosophy, and should enable

adherents to string upon its thread of hypotheses our vast and weighty stores of knowledge is

surpassing strange." - Sir J. William Dawson--------------

"Subspecies are actually, therefore, neither incipient species nor models for the origin of species. They

are more or less diversified blind alleys within the species. The decisive step in evolution, the first step

toward macroevolution, the step from one species to another, requires another evolutionary methodthan that of sheer accumulation of micromutations" (GOLDSCHMIDT 1940).

------------

Jonathan Marks, (department of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley) has pointed out theoften-overlooked problem with this "similarity" line of thinking.

Because DNA is a linear array of those four basesA,G,C, and T only four possibilities exist at

any specific point in a DNA sequence. The laws of chance tell us that two random sequences fromspecies that have no ancestry in common will match at about one in every four sites. Thus even two

unrelated DNA sequences will be 25 percent identical, not 0 percent identical (2000, p. B-7).

Therefore a human and any earthly DNA-based life form must be at least 25% identical. Would it be

correct, then, to state that daffodils are "one-quarter human"? The idea that a flower is one-quarter

human is neither profound nor enlightening; it is outlandishly ridiculous! There is hardly any biological


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comparison that could be conducted that would make daffodils humanexcept perhaps DNA. Marks

went on to concede:

Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative differences amonggenomes.... Thus, even among such close relatives as human and chimpanzee, we find that the chimps

genome is estimated to be about 10 percent larger than the humans; that one human chromosome

contains a fusion of two small chimpanzee chromosomes; and that the tips of each chimpanzeechromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans (B-7, emp. added). Marks,

Jonathan (2000), "98% Alike? (What Similarity to Apes Tells Us About Our Understanding of

Genetics)," The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12.

The truth is, if we consider the absolute amount of genetic material when comparing primates and

humans, the 1-2% difference in DNA represents approximately 80 million different nucleotides

Biologist John Randall admitted this when he wrote:

The older textbooks on evolution make much of the idea of homology, pointing out the obviousresemblances between the skeletons of the limbs of different animals. Thus the "pentadactyl" [five

boneBH/BT] limb pattern is found in the arm of a man, the wing of a bird, and flipper of a whale

and this is held to indicate their common origin. Now if these various structures were transmitted by thesame gene couples, varied from time to time by mutations and acted upon by environmental selection,

the theory would make good sense. Unfortunately this is not the case. Homologous organs are now

known to be produced by totally different gene complexes in the different species. The concept ofhomology in terms of similar genes handed on from a common ancestor has broken down...

---------

"Evidently nature can no longer be seen as matter and energy alone. Nor can all her secrets be unlocked

with the keys of chemistry and physics, brilliantly successful as these two branches of science havebeen in our century.

A third component is needed for any explanation of the world that claims to be complete. To the

powerful theories of chemistry and physics must be added a late arrival: a theory of information.Nature must be interpreted as matter, energy, and information." Jeremy C. Campbell, Journalist,

"Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life," [1982], Penguin Books:

Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1984,----------

"I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know."

Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Discover 2(5):34-37 (1981)

Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not true by definition; it is neither an ethical

principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked

out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded otherresults (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didnt happen - Gould (from Human

Equality Is a Contingent Fact of History, p. 186).

-----------"The scientific establishment's acceptance of worldwide catastrophism and mass extinction does not

signify their abandonment of materialistic evolution.

Neither has their grudging acquiescence to the fact that great catastrophes caused the deposition of

many of the fossils forced them to consider that virtually no fossils are in the process of forming on the

bottom of any lake or sea today. This is a verboten subject. When I asked the editors of several of the


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most prestigious scientific journals the reasons for this silence, I was met with more silence."

Luther D. Sunderland,"Mass Extinction & Catastrophism Replace Darwinism & Uniformitarianism

----------------

1. All languages, codes, protocols and encoding / decoding mechanisms come from intelligence - thereare no exceptions.

2. DNA contains a language, a code, a protocol, and an encoding / decoding mechanism

3. Therefore DNA came from an intelligence.----------

"... as Darwinists and neo-Darwinists have become ever more adept at finding possible selective

advantages for any trait one cares to mention, explanation in terms of the all-powerful force of naturalselection has come more and more to resemble explanation in terms of the conscious design of the

omnipotent Creator."

Mae-Wan Ho & Peter T. Saunders, Biologist at The Open University, UK and Mathematician at

University of London respectively. Eds., 'Beyond Neo- Darwinism: An Introduction to the NewEvolutionary Paradigm,' Academic Press: London, 1984

----------------

The great fallacy of evolution is that it claims all the benefits of design without the need for actualdesign. In particular, evolution attributes intelligence, the power of choice, to a fundamentally irrational

process, namely, natural selection. But nature has no power to choose. Real choices involve

deliberation, that is, some consideration of future possibilities and consequences.But natural selection is incapable of looking to the future. Instead, it acts on the spur of the moment,

based solely on what the environment right now deems fit. It cannot plan for the future. It is incapable

of deferring success or gratification. And yet, so limited a process is supposed to produce marvels ofbiological complexity and diversity that far exceed the capacities of the best human designers. Theres

no evidence that natural selection is up to the task. Natural selection is fine for explaining certain small-

scale changes in organisms, like the beaks of birds adapting to environmental changes. It can take

existing structures and hone them. But it cant explain how you get complex structures in the firstplace. Thats why molecular biologist Franklin Harold writes, "there are presently no detailed

Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful

speculations."

Remember the phrase "wishful speculations" whenever anyone starts touting the wonder-working

power of natural selection.

"Living things are so much part of everyday experience that we scarcely realize how strange they are,

and how sharply they differ from inanimate objects. All organisms, from bacteria to humans, are

exceedingly intricate molecular systems that have the unique capacity to make themselves. On the levelof the individual, each one grows and reproduces its own kind. Collectively, on a timescale of

millennia, they continuously make themselves over, adapting to changes in their external and internal

environments. Nothing else in the known universe has such powers. Living things obey all the laws ofchemistry and physics, and we have learned an enormous amount about the molecular mechanisms that

underlie all biological operations. We know much less about how these components and processes are

organized in space, and almost nothing about their origin when the world was young. Our knowledge isvast, but our understanding is partial and full of gaps; for all its familiarity and ubiquity, life remains

fundamentally mysterious."

- molecular biologist Franklin Harold - the way of the cell----------

Jonathan Wells comments in response to the question, How do you explain the Cambrian explosion of

life?


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How did it happen? We dont have the foggiest idea how it happened. Assuming a jellyfish was the

common ancestor I dont believe that but how do you turn a jellyfish into a trilobite? How do you

turn a jellyfish into a fish with a backbone? How do you do it? I dont just mean taking a scalpel andrearranging the parts like youre doing a collage in third-grade art class. Were talking about a living

animal here, that reproduces itself and makes more things like itself. How do you do it? We dont have

the foggiest idea.

To try to explain this away by saying Darwins theory accounts for it is a science-stopper. Its the

biggest science-stopper of modern history. It stops your inquiry right there. You have no morequestions. Oh, all these animals just appeared. Thats not science.

---------

Comments Dean Esmay, self-proclaimed liberal and atheist:

There are people right now in Dover, Pennsylvania fighting to ban a completely harmless book

called Of Pandas And People from public school science classes, against the express wishes of amajority of the parents. Tap-dance around it all you want, that is an attempt to ban a book from the

classroom and censor ideas. You can put all the lipstick you want on this pig, with armwaving

generalizations about "separation of church and state," but the pig won't get any prettier. It iscensorship that is being advocated here, period. It will belong right on the ALA's Banned books list,

alongside The Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn. If the Stalinist ACLU and the self-proclaimed

"defenders of science" have their way, anyhow.

And if they do get their wish and manage to get the book banned, the message will be loud and clear

once again: believers in evolution are intellectual tyrants, and science teachers are liars who hide ideas

from their students.

The courts did a tremendously stupid and destructive thing back in the 1980s when they banned so-

called "creation science." The impression was made loud and clear to tens of millions of parents andstudents: scientists are intellectual bullies and cowards, and science teachers are liars who censor

arguments that don't fit their prejudices.

You deny that was the intent? No matter. That was irrefutably the result.

----------

But how could these organic inventions, these small tools, appear? It seems most improbable that a

single mutation could have given rise simultaneously to the various elements which compose, say, apress-stud or hooking device. Several mutations must therefore be assumed, but this implies the further

assumption of close co-ordination between different and distinct mutations. Such indispensable co-

ordination is a major stumbling block, for no known mutations occur in this way.----------

Other examples of irreducible complexity abound, including aspects of protein transport, blood

clotting, closed circular DNA, electron transport, the bacterial flagellum, telomeres, hotosynthesis,transcription regulation, and much more.

-------

http://www.expasy.ch/cgi-bin/show_thumbnails.pl - biochemical pathways diagram-------

HAHAHA !: http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/041117_running_humans.html


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"Those who ran well separated themselves from the pack of apes and became the earliest humans,

eating protein that enlarged their brains.

Running got us out of the trees and made us smarter.

We are very confident that strong selection for running -- which came at the expense of the historical

ability to live in trees -- was instrumental in the origin of the modern human body form," saidUniversity of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble.

The idea is presented in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Nature.

"So is walking going to be what suddenly transforms the hominid body?" Bramble asks. "No, walking

won't do that, but running will."

Bramble and Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman examined 26 human traits that

contribute to our ability to give chase. They compared many of these to fossils of our ancestors.

Compared to us, Australopithecus had long forearms, short legs, and terrible arches. It walked aroundwith a permanent shoulder shrug ill suited for jogging.

So why would evolution have selected for the development of these features?

Biologist David Carrier, also of the University of Utah, provided a possible answer in previous

research. Before humans had invented the bow and arrow, Carrier reasons, it would have beenadvantageous to wear down prey with an endless pursuit.

Carrier, who was not involved in the latest study, showed that differences in how humans breathe and

sweat suited them for endurance. Further, he found evidence that Navajo Indians and other primitivecultures were able to run down very swift animals.

The new study provides more detailed anatomical evidence to support Carrier's earlier hypothesis, hetold LiveScience.

"I think it's very well thought out," Carrier said of the Bramble and Lieberman study. "I think there'sstrong support for their arguments."

Importantly, the food that early humans could catch by simply outlasting their prey -- meat -- would

have changed everything.

"What these features and fossil facts appear to be telling us is that running evolved in order for our

direct ancestors to compete with other carnivores for access to the protein needed to grow the bigbrains that we enjoy today," Lieberman said.

Other things that make you born to run, according to the study:

Compared to apes, your flat face, small teeth and short snout shift the center of mass of your head

back, so it doesn't bob up and down when you jog.

Your height and, ahem, narrow physique create more skin surface for sweating and cooling.


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Human heels, toes and arches are well designed for pushing off and absorbing shock.

A ligament ties the back of your skull to your vertebrae, acting like a shock absorber. Large

vertebrae and disks assist in allowing a less-jarring gait.

Your upper and lower body move independently, making it easier to balance while your legs swing.

Short forearms help, too.

When your head sweats, blood in veins near the surface is cooled. The veins pass near carotid

arteries, helping cool blood on its way to the brain.

The human backside helps, too. A good-sized hiney stabilizes your trunk. Bramble asks: "Have you

ever looked at an ape? They have no buns."

-----------SETI & ID :

Narrow-band signals, say those that are only a few Hertz or less wide, are the mark of a purposely builttransmitter. Natural cosmic noisemakers, such as pulsars, quasars, and the turbulent, thin interstellar

gas of our own Milky Way, do not make radio signals that are this narrow.

The Targeted Search System looks for signals in the range 1,000 MHz to 3,000 MHz, with a frequency

resolution of 1 Hz.

Any signal less than about 300 Hz wide must be, as far as we know, artificially produced. Such narrow-

band signals are what all SETI experiments look for. Other tell-tale characteristics include a signal that

is completely polarized or the existence of coded information on the signal.

If the signal is intentional, it might be decipherable. In order to send or receive a signal over interstellar

distances, a civilization must understand basic science and mathematics. Hence, a message from

another civilization might use science and math to build up a common language with other socieites.Signals sent by a civilization for its own purposes may be impossible for us to unravel. But one thing

we would know irrespective of content is that another intelligent civilization is out there.

---

When Does SETI Throw in the Towel?

By Seth ShostakSETI Institute

posted: 18 January 2007

06:38 am ET

"At what point would you abandon the search?"

Thats a question I get relatively frequently from folks who think that SETI may be a quixotic quest, as

futile as searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. After all, modern efforts to find signals from

extraterrestrial transmitters are now in their fifth decade. Could it be that those of us who still hope totune in other worlds may be missing some writing on the wall? Some dead-obvious, chiseled text with

a simple, if disappointing message: "There are no aliens"?


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The question seems fair, since SETIs obvious analogsthe historical voyages of discovery made in the

centuries following the Renaissancewere completed in considerably less time than SETI has been

beating the cosmic bushes. Columbus spent five weeks finding North America (and he wasnt even

looking). Captain Cook, a true paragon of explorers, and a man who mapped places that Europeansdidnt even know were places, never mounted an expedition that lasted more than three years.

But those analogs are false. The South Pacific, for all its watery wastes, is comprehensible in size. EvenCooks unimpressive Whitby collier, powered by sailcloth, could cross the Pacific in a matter of

months, come about, and cross again in a different direction. His quarry, the islands peppering the

ocean like coins scattered onto a living room carpet, signaled their presence by clots of clouds evenwhen the islands themselves were below the horizon.

The SETI wilderness is incomparably larger, obviously, and its quarry is cryptic. Even if there are ten

thousand transmitting societies nestled in the arms of the Milky Way, we might need to search millionsof star systems before we find one. The actual number of star systems that radio SETI experiments

have carefully examined is fewer than a thousand.

Its a simple truth, although one not universally acknowledged, that SETI is still in its early stages.

Consequently, many of its practitioners will tell you that this is a multigenerational experiment, akin to

building cathedrals in medieval Europe. In other words, a lot of SETI scientists will answer thequestion that began this article by saying "not in my lifetime, nor in that of my children or

grandchildren."

Fighting words, but could they be hyperbolic? To begin with, SETI experiments will have examined

millions of star systems within a generation. And within two, we could carefully check every star in

the Galaxy. The SETI ship has a lot of ocean to cover, but thanks to new technologies, its picking up

speed. So clearly, if we havent found something by mid-century or so, it will be hard to argue that itsstill "early stages."

And frankly, its conceivable that SETIs basic assumptions might be proven wrong. Imagine that thenew space-based telescopes (COROT and Kepler) currently being deployed to hunt for Earth-size

planets around other stars come up empty. That would be a premium-grade bum

mer. But even if (as widely expected) they do discover rocky worlds, its possible that a decade or sodown the line, their telescopic successorsatmosphere-sniffing instruments such as the Terrestrial

Planet Findermight fail to find any extrasolar worlds on which life has taken hold.

Spacecraft of the future might return to us the news that neither Mars, Europa, nor any of the other orbsof the solar system with liquid water have ever produced a microbe. If these are headlines of the

futureif the local cosmic neighborhood turns out to be as sterile as prime-time televisionthen that

would certainly put me on the defensive.

But the fact is that none of this incites me to break out the worry beads. Not yet. The various factors in

the well-known Drake Equation, which is often used to estimate the chances of SETI success, haveatleast until nowbecome more encouraging with time, not less. The more we learn about the universe,

the more it seems disposed to house worlds with life. It didnt have to be that way.

Somewhat more disquieting is the possibility that our approach is wrong. SETI today is

overwhelmingly a search for narrow-band electromagnetic transmissions, or in fewer syllables, a hunt

for beamed radio or light. We search with straightforward telescopic techniques, but its possible that


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alien broadcasts could be encoded in ways that were not set up to find. Im not talking about how they

construct their messagesor whether theyre broadcasting in Standard American English or a lilting

Klingon dialectbut the technical scheme they use. For instance, Walt Simmons at the University of

Hawaii has suggested that garrulous aliens might wield two widely separated transmitters and usequantum mechanical effects to encode their messages. The advantage would be that if we opened this

type of alien mail, it would be impossible to tell from which direction it came, thereby protecting the

anonymity of the sender. This sort of approachstill somewhat beyond our technical abilitiesmightmake our present receiving schemes seem nave.

In addition, theres always the chance that the discovery of new physics will reveal somecommunication mode thats either faster than light and radio, or requires less energy to use. This

doesnt seem likely, but science is all about surprises.

Indeed, my personal feeling is that if SETI hasnt turned up something by the second half of thiscentury, we should reconsider our search strategy, rather than assume that weve failed because there is

nothingor no oneto find. Would I ever conclude that weve searched enough? Would I ever truly

give up on SETIs bedrock premise, and tell myself that the extraterrestrials simply arent out there?Not likely. That would be to assume that weve learned all there is to know about our universe, a

stance that is contrary to the spirit of explorers and scientists alike. We might yearn, or even need to

believe that we are special, but to conclude that Homo sapiens is the best the cosmos has to offer isegregious self-adulation.

------------Live Science :

Perhaps most troubling of all, Darwin's theory of evolution tells us that life existed for billions of years

before us, that humans are not the products of special creation and that life has no inherent meaning or

purpose.- Ker Than, Live Science staff writer, 22 September 2005

------------

All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, forinstance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud

chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists conclusions less certain.

-------------AR Wallace came to believe that natural selection acting on random variations could not explain a

number of things in biology, especially the development of the human brain. He concluded instead that

"a Higher Intelligence" guided the process:

[T]here seems to be evidence of a Power which has guided the action of those laws [of organic

development] in definite directions and for special ends. And so far from this view being out of

harmony with the teachings of science, it has a striking analogy with what is now taking place in theworld...

---------

"I reject evolution because I deem it obsolete, because the knowledge, hard won since 1830, ofanatomy, histology, cytology, and embryology, cannot be made to accord with its basic idea.

The foundationless, fantastic edifice of the evolution doctrine would long ago have met with its long

deserved fate were it not that the love of fairy tales is so deep-rooted in the hearts of man." AlbertFleischmann, University of Erlangen

------------

"I would rather believe in fairy tales than in such wild speculation. I have said for years that


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speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far

too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their

attempts to explain the unexplainable. God cannot be explained away by such naive thoughts." Sir

Ernst B. Chain, Nobel Laureate (Medicine, 1945), as quoted by Ronald W. Clark, The Life of ErnstChain (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1985), pp. 147-148

------

"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated, the Darwinian theory ofevolution stands under attack as never before. ...

The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and

professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from theevolutionist camp.

It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on

the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some

instances regretfully, as one could say.We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has

established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon

evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as beingimmune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the

crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists." Wolfgang Smith, Mathematician and

Physicist. Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University. Former math instructor at MIT.-------------------

"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, was ... it struck me that I had been

working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it.That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. ...so for the last few weeks I've tried

putting a simple question to various people and groups of people.

Question: 'Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true?'

I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the onlyanswer I got was silence.

I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a

very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually oneperson said, 'I do know one thing it ought not to be taught in high school'." Dr. Colin Patterson,

Senior Palaeontologist. British Museum of Natural History, London. Keynote address at the American

Museum of Natural History, New York City--------

--------

A

In his book In the Beginning Was Information, Dr. Werner Gitt, an expert in information systems,

deduces certain conclusions from the information found in DNA. Here is a summary:

Since the DNA code has all the essential characteristics of information, there must have been a sender

of this information.

Since the density and complexity of the DNA information is millions of times greater than man's

present technology, the sender must be supremely intelligent.

Since the sender must have encoded (stored) the information into the DNA molecule and constructed

the molecular biomachines to encode, decode and run the cells, the sender must be purposeful and


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supremely powerful.

Since information is a nonmaterial entity and cannot originate from matter, the sender must have a

nonmaterial component (spirit).

Since information cannot originate from matter and is also created by man, man's nature must have a

nonmaterial component (spirit).

Since biological information can only originate from an intelligent sender and all theories of chemical

and biological evolution are based on the premise that information comes solely from matter andenergy (with no sender), then the theories of chemical and biological evolution are false.

--------

the theory stipulates that Nature in effect must transmute a motorcycle into an automobile whileproviding continuous transportation. S. Vogel

------

time and again, biologists do explain the survival of an organism by reference to its fitness and thefitness of an organism by reference to its survival

--------

"When we examine the visual mechanism closely," Karen K. de Valois remarked recently in Science,"although we understand much about its component parts, we fail to fathom the ways in which they fit

together to produce the whole of our complex visual perception."

These facts suggest a chastening reformulation of Gould's "excellent" question, one adapted to reality:

could a system we do not completely understand be constructed by means of a process we cannot

completely specify?

--------DARWIN CONCEIVED of evolution in terms of small variations among organisms, variations which

by a process of accretion allow one species to change continuously into another. This suggests a view

in which living creatures are spread out smoothly over the great manifold of biological possibilities,like colors merging imperceptibly in a color chart.

Life, however, is absolutely nothing like this. Wherever one looks there is singularity, quirkiness,

oddness, defiant individuality, and just plain weirdness. The male redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti),for example, is often consumed during copulation. Such is sexual cannibalism -- the result, biologists

have long assumed, of "predatory females overcoming the defenses of weaker males." But it now

appears that among Latrodectus basselti, the male is complicit in his own consumption. Having

achieved intromission, this schnook performs a characteristic somersault, placing his abdomen directlyover his partner's mouth. ...

It might seem that sexual suicide confers no advantage on the spider, the male passing from ecstasy toextinction in the course of one and the same act. But spiders willing to pay for love are apparently

favored by female spiders (no surprise, there); and female spiders with whom they mate, entomologists

claim, are less likely to mate again....

This explanation resolves one question only at the cost of inviting another: why such bizarre behavior?

In no other Latrodectus species does the male perform that obliging somersault, offering his partner theoblation of his life as well as his love. Are there general principles that specify sexual suicide among

this species, but that forbid sexual suicide elsewhere? If so, what are they?


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Once asked, such questions tend to multiply like party guests. If evolutionary theory cannot answer

them, what, then, is its use? Why is the Pitcher plant carnivorous, but not the thorn bush, and why does

the Pacific salmon require fresh water to spawn, but not the Chilean sea bass? Why has the British

thrush learned to hammer snails upon rocks, but not the British blackbird, which often starves to deathin the midst of plenty? Why did the firefly discover bioluminescence, but not the wasp or the warrior

ant; why do the bees do their dance, but not the spider or the flies; and why are women, but not cats,

born without the sleek tails that would make them even more alluring than they already are?

Why? Yes, why? The question, simple, clear, intellectually respectable, was put to the Nobel laureate

George Wald. "Various organisms try various things," he finally answered, his words functioning as averbal shrug, "they keep what works and discard the rest."

But suppose the manifold of life were to be given a good solid yank, so that the Chilean sea bass but

not the Pacific salmon required fresh water to spawn, or that ants but not fireflies flickered enticingly attwilight, or that women but not cats were born with lush tails. What then? An inversion of life's

fundamental facts would, I suspect, present evolutionary biologists with few difficulties. Various

organisms try various things. This idea is adapted to any contingency whatsoever, an interestingexample of a Darwinian mechanism in the development of Darwinian thought itself.

A comparison with geology is instructive. No geological theory makes it possible to specify precisely aparticular mountain's shape; but the underlying process of upthrust and crumbling is well understood,

and geologists can specify something like a mountain's generic shape. This provides geological theory

with a firm connection to reality. A mountain arranging itself in the shape of the letter "A" is not aphysically possible object; it is excluded by geological theory.

The theory of evolution, by contrast, is incapable of ruling anything out of court. That job must be done

by nature. But a theory that can confront any contingency with unflagging success cannot be falsified.Its control of the facts is an illusion.

In a superbly elaborated figure, the Australian biologist Michael Denton compares a single cell to animmense automated factory, one the size of a large city:

On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship,

opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter oneof these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering

complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every

direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus

and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast sphericalchamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see,

all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecule....

We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules,

were, astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery....Yet the life of the cell depends on the

integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of differentprotein molecules.

And whatever the complexity of the cell, it is insignificant in comparison with the mammalian nervoussystem; and beyond that, far impossibly ahead, there is the human mind, an instrument like no other in

the biological world, conscious, flexible, penetrating, inscrutable, and profound.

--------


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A sentence obeys the laws of English grammar; a sequence is lawless

How on earth could the sentences be discovered by chance amid such an infernal and hyperborean

immensity of gibberish? They cannot be discovered by chance, and, of course, chance plays no role in

their discovery.The eerie and unexpected presence of an alphabet in every living creature might suggest the possibility

of a similar argument in biology. It is DNA of course, that acts as life's primordial text, the code itself

organized in nucleic triplets, like messages in Morse code. Each triplet is matched to a particularchemical object, an amino acid. There are twenty such acids in all. They correspond to letters in an

alphabet. As the code is read somewhere in life's hidden housing, the linear order of the nucleic acids

induces a corresponding linear order in the amino acids. The biological finger writes, and what the cellreads is an ordered presentation of such amino acids-a protein.

Like the nucleic acids, proteins are alphabetic objects, composed of discrete constituents. On average,

proteins are roughly 250 amino acid residues in length, so a given protein may be imagined as a longbiochemical word, one of many.

The aspects of an analogy are now in place. What is needed is a relevant contrast, somethingcomparable to sentences and sequences in language. Of course nothing completely comparable is at

hand: there are no sentences in molecular biology. Nonetheless, there is this fact, helpfully recounted

by Richard Dawkins: "The actual animals that have ever lived on earth are a tiny subset of thetheoretical animals that could exist." It follows that over the course of four billion years, life has

expressed itself by means of a particular stock of proteins, a certain set of life-like words.

A COMBINATORIAL COUNT is now possible. The MIT physicist Murray Eden, to whom I owe this

argument, estimates the number of the viable proteins at 10 to the 50th power. Within this set is the raw

material of everything that has ever lived: the flowering plants and the alien insects and the seagoing

turtles and the sad shambling dinosaurs, the great evolutionary successes and the great evolutionaryfailures as well. These creatures are, quite literally, composed of the proteins that over the course of

time have performed some useful function, with "usefulness" now standing for the sense of

sentencehood in linguistics.

As in the case of language, what has once lived occupies some corner in the space of a larger array of

possibilities, the actual residing in the shadow of the possible. The space of all possible proteins of afixed length (250 residues, recall) is computed by multiplying 20 by itself 250 times (20 to the 250th

power). It is idle to carry out the calculation. The numbers larger by far than seconds in the history of

the world since the Big Bang or grains of sand on the shores of every sounding sea.

It would seem that evolution, Murray Eden writes in artfully ambiguous language, "was directed

toward the incredibly small proportion of useful protein forms. . . ," the word "directed" conveying, at

least to me, the sobering image of a stage-managed search-------

This need is met in evolutionary theory by natural selection, the filter but not the source of change. "It

may be said," Darwin wrote, that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout theworld, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that

is good: silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, as the

improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

Natural selection emerges from these reflections as a strange force-like concept. It is strange because it

is unconnected to any notion of force in physics, and it is force-like because natural selection does


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something, it has an effect and so u

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