Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

Out of all the people with a novel idea who encounter resistance, how are we meant to pick out the handful who happen to be right beforehand, so as not to give them any resistance and forego the "evidence" requirement?

Linda

Was this your effort to contribute to the retro-causality discussion?


My understanding of the history of the recent conversion of a failed theory of evolution, to one that is tractable, is not in synch with yours.  The answers creating the advancements were - and still are - synonymous with the rise of bioinformatics.  The apologists, like Myers, Dawkins and others - are going silent - or going in other directions.  They imagined genes working in ways that are now proven wrong!  What they wrote for decades are mostly "Rosanna Dana" never-minds. 

The rise of life has little to do with random accidents in chemistry and has everything to do with the rise of  biological communication. DNA/RNA/Ribosome systems have defined language as a functional requirement.  Chemistry doesn't measure or observe language.  Information science tools like Biosemiotics and pattern recognition software do!!!

My understanding of the history of the recent conversion of a failed theory of evolution, to one that is tractable, is not in synch with yours.  The answers creating the advancements were - and still are - synonymous with the rise of bioinformatics.  The apologists, like Myers, Dawkins and others - are going silent - or going in other directions.  They imagined genes working in ways that are now proven wrong!  What they wrote for decades are mostly "Rosanna Dana" never-minds. 

The rise of life has little to do with random accidents in chemistry and has everything to do with the rise of  biological communication. DNA/RNA/Ribosome systems have defined language as a functional requirement.  Chemistry doesn't measure or observe language.  Information science tools like Biosemiotics and pattern recognition software do!!!

Well said!

The more I look at the poor state of science with regards to Evolution and the Origin of Life, the more I resign myself to the currently superior theories only being truly accepted when the proponents of the current stagnated theories die.

As Max Planck famously stated:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

The idea is that there can be causal loops that are consistent, and therefore not paradoxical. Consistency doesn't mean that they don't make a difference, though it's not really right to talk about a difference, because if we're talking about time loops there can't be any question of comparing "before" and "after", or "with" and "without" - except in terms of what would have happened in a different universe with no retro-causation. As I understand it, Wargo's argument isn't that retro-causation exists but is insignificant, but that it's fundamental to the way the world works.

The question most of concern at this point in this thread is how retro-causation could be an underlying mechanism for innovation in evolution. It seems to me that this can't be the case. This is because for any retro-causal introduction of the complex specified genetic information for intricate new biological structures and systems to make a difference in evolution, the subsequent outworking of evolution would have been fundamentally changed. After hundreds of millions of years the effects of the interference would radiate outward to affect virtually everything in Earth life. 

These uncountable changes would include making virtually all presently alive humans nonexistent, since the whole structure of human ancestry would fundamentally change. Also, whatever process or mechanism was responsible for the retro-causative information transfer event would itself be changed by the interference in the past. But that would presumably change the nature of the interference or even prevent it from ever happening. An "inconsistency". So a time travel paradox is created. So presumably it couldn't happen - the retro-causal information transfer in evolution would be prevented from ever occurring.

And also, as I mentioned previously, such retro-causation in evolution just "kicks the can down the road" so to speak, since it still doesn't explain the actual origin of the complex specified information for the new biological systems.

Was this your effort to contribute to the retro-causality discussion?


My understanding of the history of the recent conversion of a failed theory of evolution, to one that is tractable, is not in synch with yours.  The answers creating the advancements were - and still are - synonymous with the rise of bioinformatics.  The apologists, like Myers, Dawkins and others - are going silent - or going in other directions.  They imagined genes working in ways that are now proven wrong!  What they wrote for decades are mostly "Rosanna Dana" never-minds. 

The rise of life has little to do with random accidents in chemistry and has everything to do with the rise of  biological communication. DNA/RNA/Ribosome systems have defined language as a functional requirement.  Chemistry doesn't measure or observe language.  Information science tools like Biosemiotics and pattern recognition software do!!!

Is the apologist you mention, Stephen Myers, the intelligent design guy?

nbtruthman

The idea isn't that time goes along and then some retrocausation occurs and after that the past is different from what it was previously. What would it mean for something that happened last week to be different from what it was yesterday? It doesn't make sense.

The idea is not that the past is "changed" by the retrocausal influence, but that it's shaped by it - and always has been. And because the universe must remain consistent, there are constraints on the effect of that influence, which necessarily prevent paradoxes from arising.

Retro-causation may indeed kick the can down the road, but that's a different question from paradoxes.

For the avoidance of doubt - I'm not saying I accept these ideas, I'm just trying to explain my understanding of them.

Was this your effort to contribute to the retro-causality discussion?

Lol.

My understanding of the history of the recent conversion of a failed theory of evolution, to one that is tractable, is not in synch with yours.

I don't see why it would be. You seem to be devoted to the idea of "information" and fit everything to that, and I still don't understand what it is that you think is different about it.

Linda

The idea is not that the past is "changed" by the retrocausal influence, but that it's shaped by it - and always has been. And because the universe must remain consistent, there are constraints on the effect of that influence, which necessarily prevent paradoxes from arising.

Why does the universe have to remain consistent? It seems to me retrocausation is a bigger argument for a top-down creator than ID?

Why does the universe have to remain consistent? It seems to me retrocausation is a bigger argument for a top-down creator than ID?

Do you mean what forces the universe to remain consistent? If so, I think consistency is supposed to be a fundamental property of the universe, rather than something enforced by a particular mechanism.

Isn't the assumption of consistency viewed by quantum foundations people as the alternative to multiple universes? I suppose it's possible to believe in retro-causation without imposing a consistency requirement, if there are multiple universes that branch both forwards and backwards in time ...

Do you mean what forces the universe to remain consistent? If so, I think consistency is supposed to be a fundamental property of the universe, rather than something enforced by a particular mechanism.

Isn't the assumption of consistency viewed by quantum foundations people as the alternative to multiple universes? I suppose it's possible to believe in retro-causation without imposing a consistency requirement, if there are multiple universes that branch both forwards and backwards in time ...

I honestly would need to dig deeper into the interpretations allowing for retrocausation to say more, but it does seem to me consistency is a human desire - the very concept of "natural laws" points to that as well.

Not directly related (AFAIK) to retrocausation is an idea that the physicist Lee Smolin proposed, that the "Present" is a bubble in some sense rather than a singular point on a (supposed) temporal 4th dimensional axis. (I don't think Time is, in any way, akin to the other 3 axes of space)