Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

The list of papers below is some of the peer-reviewed scientific research papers on ID and ID-related topics published by members of the DI. Looking at this sort of work, can you suggest how such methods and techniques of science could be used to investigate the question of who or what creatively and physically intervened in evolution hundreds or scores of millions of years ago? Short of inventing a time machine to go back and actually observe what happened, I don't think much can be done scientifically other than some semi-informed speculation.

1.  An omnipotent omniscient God could have done it
2.  Very advanced alien extraterrestrial beings could have done it
3.  Very advanced angelic or other sorts of spiritual beings could have done it
4.  Some combination of the above could have done it
5.  Perhaps it was some sort of intelligent and creative force imbued in all of life that did it
6.  Or fill in with your own pet hypothesis about who or what did it

Only 5 or perhaps 6 could be investigated using the methods of science.

Well physicists are hard at work to find the best explanations for what happened at our universe's point of origin, so not sure it is impossible to at least rank, in terms of likelihood, the options you list?

And if we tinker with the DNA of other life forms and then destroy ourselves, surely our successors as sentient tool using lifeforms could learn something about us?

Now regarding 1-6 I'd start with another example of proximate cause  ->

Let's say we found a new Gobekli Tepe type site, but even further back - perhaps even predating the emergence of any primate species whatsoever.

Would your first thought be that some pre-human race built the temple, or that God willed the structure to be formed? My guess is the former, because it makes more sense to start "small" & "close" and then work our way up to "God did it".

This is why I suggested doing PK-type experiments to see if the evolution of micro-organisms can be influenced by human level Psi, and then seeing if results improve when you add in an invocation to a spirit. Heck, have a medium ask the dead if they can do something here.

If there are good results then just as Dembski himself compares ID to influencing an RNG it would make more sense to say the difference between this kind of Psi experiment and what ID claims to show is one of degree. If good results only come when spirits are invoked then just look at the varied cases of interaction with spirits, for example from paranthropology. The fact something much lower than the Creator can weight random mutation via mental intent would strongly suggest the designers were Psi-capable entities in creation rather than the God who is Ground of All Creation.

So that would give us more reason to believe 3-5, and let's say 6 is "Our Universe is a Simulation anyway."

Further reason to believe 2-5 over 1 is that we already have cases where aliens apparently healed people, where a dead doctor can work through a medium to heal people, and where psychics have healed people. So it seems manipulation of the body via what we usually think of as "immaterial" means is something that can be done at a level much lower than that of the Creator. Now if the aliens are using some technological process rather than Psi then that would be a separate concern, but let's grant for a moment they too use Psi. The experiment above would confirm that this bodily manipulation via mental action can also improve adaptation rates.

For 2 specifically we might examine the evidence that aliens - or as per Vallee "neighbors" who somehow share this world with us - exist and have interacted with us or our evolutionary ancestors. This interaction may even go back to the origins of life. Perhaps there are also codes in our DNA that are suggestive of alien intervention, or points to pan-spermia. For example:



And as for 6 if we find evidence of the Simulation Hypothesis that is convincing enough, it would be quite unreasonable to say "We're in a simulation but the Creator of this simulation's programmers actually shifted the programs running our biome's evolution." Some experiments have been proposed so we'll have to see what comes out of them.

Now a person can argue we cannot ever fully rule out that the post hoc weighting of random mutation was done by the same Creator who meticulously set the finely tuned constants when the universe was first formed. But then a person can also insist that Super Psi just has to be true. At some point the more reasonable possibilities should take precedence.

This is just from the top of my head, unlike IDers who've been working for quite a few years in the field.

Edit: If he counts an an IDer I will give credit the Noble physicist Brian Josepson, who has actually tried to give arguments for the designers by way of Wheeler's Observer-Participancy.

After all if the big-G created everything and is the Ultimate Cause for the evolutionary process itself occurring within our physical universe why would He/She/It need to later make the edits to [this same] process that IDers claim as their evidence? Not even direct edits but manipulations of probability?

Great discussion going on.  Don't want to distract from it.  My opinions on ID are pretty fixed.  I understand the claim of M. Behe as a positive one.  On the other hand; the arguments of Dembski and others are weakly asserted.

Structured information (CSI being one type) is generated from mental activity.  Biological functions are structured as if they were designed by the feedback from efforts toward a goal (Cybernetics).  Surely, the evolution of a tail for motion has the benefit of trial and error development, as all the many tails we observe present as an adaptation.  Living things explore informational space (where probable benefits exist before their application) by being aware of the stream of information processing ongoing.

Living things know about the future because the wave functions are interacting with future probabilities and those interference patterns can be converted to mutual information by an agent in the present. 

My thesis is founded on the minds of living things changing real-world activity.  Living awareness is based on grounding in detection of probabilities in real-time.  These transfers of information forming mutual structures -- are resultant from detecting affordances in the informational environment.  For THE proximate cause of evolution -- it is mind taking advantage of possibilities by selecting for behavior that conforms and confirms plans of action.

A dominant old man magically creating humans as if toy shapes - seems to be evolving to being a grand programmer who puts living things on a course to find the best Themselves.

Well physicists are hard at work to find the best explanations for what happened at our universe's point of origin, so not sure it is impossible to at least rank, in terms of likelihood, the options you list?

And if we tinker with the DNA of other life forms and then destroy ourselves, surely our successors as sentient tool using lifeforms could learn something about us?

Now regarding 1-6 I'd start with another example of proximate cause  ->

Let's say we found a new Gobekli Tepe type site, but even further back - perhaps even predating the emergence of any primate species whatsoever.

Would your first thought be that some pre-human race built the temple, or that God willed the structure to be formed? My guess is the former, because it makes more sense to start "small" & "close" and then work our way up to "God did it".

This is why I suggested doing PK-type experiments to see if the evolution of micro-organisms can be influenced by human level Psi, and then seeing if results improve when you add in an invocation to a spirit. Heck, have a medium ask the dead if they can do something here.

If there are good results then just as Dembski himself compares ID to influencing an RNG it would make more sense to say the difference between this kind of Psi experiment and what ID claims to show is one of degree. If good results only come when spirits are invoked then just look at the varied cases of interaction with spirits, for example from paranthropology. The fact something much lower than the Creator can weight random mutation via mental intent would strongly suggest the designers were Psi-capable entities in creation rather than the God who is Ground of All Creation.

So that would give us more reason to believe 3-5, and let's say 6 is "Our Universe is a Simulation anyway."

Further reason to believe 2-5 over 1 is that we already have cases where aliens apparently healed people, where a dead doctor can work through a medium to heal people, and where psychics have healed people. So it seems manipulation of the body via what we usually think of as "immaterial" means is something that can be done at a level much lower than that of the Creator. Now if the aliens are using some technological process rather than Psi then that would be a separate concern, but let's grant for a moment they too use Psi. The experiment above would confirm that this bodily manipulation via mental action can also improve adaptation rates.

For 2 specifically we might examine the evidence that aliens - or as per Vallee "neighbors" who somehow share this world with us - exist and have interacted with us or our evolutionary ancestors. This interaction may even go back to the origins of life. Perhaps there are also codes in our DNA that are suggestive of alien intervention, or points to pan-spermia. For example:



And as for 6 if we find evidence of the Simulation Hypothesis that is convincing enough, it would be quite unreasonable to say "We're in a simulation but the Creator of this simulation's programmers actually shifted the programs running our biome's evolution." Some experiments have been proposed so we'll have to see what comes out of them.

Now a person can argue we cannot ever fully rule out that the post hoc weighting of random mutation was done by the same Creator who meticulously set the finely tuned constants when the universe was first formed. But then a person can also insist that Super Psi just has to be true. At some point the more reasonable possibilities should take precedence.

This is just from the top of my head, unlike IDers who've been working for quite a few years in the field.

Edit: If he counts an an IDer I will give credit the Noble physicist Brian Josepson, who has actually tried to give arguments for the designers by way of Wheeler's Observer-Participancy.

No one has ever to my knowledge conducted any experiments involving the effects of psi on the evolution of organisms, but there have been a number of studies measuring the effects of psi on mold, bacterial and other cellular growth. There were some very positive results.

"Life phenomena are important factors when parapsychological phenomena are discussed. This has been clearly demonstrated through experiments on cultured cells or other living organisms; if healers gave their power such as “ki” (also known as “qi”), “non-contact healing” and “bio-PK” to plants or cells, anomalous changes of the growth ratio or activity of the target organisms were detected (Grad, 1976; Yamauchi et al, 1996; Kataoka et al., 1997a; 1997b; Radin et al. 2003). Parapsychological phenomena can be detected even in cells which do not have consciousness."

(from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d9c5/ef...11d9cb.pdf )

In the area of evolution, Lenski has conducted a multi-thousand generation bacterial evolution experiment, nutrient-depriving a strain of millions of bacteria for a prolonged period of time hoping to demonstrate creative evolution by Darwinistic processes of random mutation plus natural selection. It failed, achieving mainly genetic devolvement, breaking various genes to achieve limited gains, not creatively producing new innovative structures. This confirmed Behe's prediction. The one apparent success was the development of citrate metabolism by the organisms, but Behe has pointed out that this was achieved by the bacteria by modifying an existing low-level citrate genetic path that already existed in the genome. Nothing really new and innovative was produced by the experiment.

I share your view that the designers in macro-evolution have most likely been powerful and advanced spiritual beings perhaps of an angelic nature, operating from the spiritual realm but manifesting in the physical. This seems much more likely than the Deity whatever it/him/her really is, and much more likely than aliens from other planetary systems. 

That leaves open the (remote) possibility that our own souls have participated in this brilliantly intelligent and ingenious creative process. 

If we ever really understood innovative macro-evolution and the creation of species then I think we would be closer to understanding the spiritual world.

Of course as you pointed out there is also the possibility that we are in a P2P virtual reality world simulation, where evolution could for instance simply be an artifact of the simulation of the present world; i.e the extensive fossil record, DNA evidence, etc. would all be deliberately created by the creators of the simulation to deceive us. Not credible at least to me. 

One last thought: even if experiments were conducted in attempt to create and influence evolution of organisms via psi effects, and they failed, that would not rule out that advanced spirits may have powers not available to humans. So I don't think such experiments would clinch any conclusions on the matter.

I share your view that the designers in macro-evolution have most likely been powerful and advanced spiritual beings perhaps of an angelic nature, operating from the spiritual realm but manifesting in the physical. This seems much more likely than the Deity whatever it/him/her really is, and much more likely than aliens from other planetary systems. 



If we ever really understood innovative macro-evolution and the creation of species then I think we would be closer to understanding the spiritual world.

I strongly agree that understanding evolution at the physical level, spiritual level and maybe from a divine viewpoint has breakthrough potential.

What is the difference in the generative ability of advanced spiritual beings and us, other than quality.  Did Ghandi's example (meme) not count, because he was alive?  I would assert his efforts are substantial in documenting about what has evolved spiritually in the last generations of humanity.

To put it in computer terms, are "angels/gurus/spirits" apps just like us, while executing in the environment of an underlying source code, from the bios.

Great discussion going on.  Don't want to distract from it.  My opinions on ID are pretty fixed.  I understand the claim of M. Behe as a positive one.  On the other hand; the arguments of Dembski and others are weakly asserted.

Structured information (CSI being one type) is generated from mental activity.  Biological functions are structured as if they were designed by the feedback from efforts toward a goal (Cybernetics).  Surely, the evolution of a tail for motion has the benefit of trial and error development, as all the many tails we observe present as an adaptation.  Living things explore informational space (where probable benefits exist before their application) by being aware of the stream of information processing ongoing.

Living things know about the future because the wave functions are interacting with future probabilities and those interference patterns can be converted to mutual information by an agent in the present. 

My thesis is founded on the minds of living things changing real-world activity.  Living awareness is based on grounding in detection of probabilities in real-time.  These transfers of information forming mutual structures -- are resultant from detecting affordances in the informational environment.  For THE proximate cause of evolution -- it is mind taking advantage of possibilities by selecting for behavior that conforms and confirms plans of action.

A dominant old man magically creating humans as if toy shapes - seems to be evolving to being a grand programmer who puts living things on a course to find the best Themselves.

I strongly agree that understanding evolution at the physical level, spiritual level and maybe from a divine viewpoint has breakthrough potential.

What is the difference in the generative ability of advanced spiritual beings and us, other than quality.  Did Ghandi's example (meme) not count, because he was alive?  I would assert his efforts are substantial in documenting about what has evolved spiritually in the last generations of humanity.

To put it in computer terms, are "angels/gurus/spirits" apps just like us, while executing in the environment of an underlying source code, from the bios.

I don't think is a distraction at all, as it ties into this question of the potential identity of a designer(s).

That said...I guess I am not quite sure what your position is - are you suggesting that consciousness within living things adapts in some cases but fails in others and then this experience of success/failure is then translated to the next generation? [Epigenetics + Psi perhaps?]

Also, do you see spiritual evolution as something that has gradual movements then punctuated development, and this in turn affects the genetic physical structure? Or is something less direct going on, perhaps evolution of both spirit selves and physical bodies are obeying a principle/law of Nature together? Is there a feedback loop here?

And your idea of God, by Programmer do you mean an entity that imparts powers at the outset of life's beginning to strive toward improvement?

That said...I guess I am not quite sure what your position is - are you suggesting that consciousness within living things adapts in some cases but fails in others and then this experience of success/failure is then translated to the next generation? [Epigenetics + Psi perhaps?]

I think that mental activity creates information objects.  I draw a distinction - between consciousness as the focus in generation of organized intentions - and mental activity.  Subconscious activity may be more productive in general, with conscious activity being a smaller, but more decisive process to structure niches for the benefit of an agent.  Subconscious habits have something like momentum. 

Rather than seeing a living agent as primarily a physical being, independently generating meaning, an ecological view is taken.  In that framework -- meaning flows thru a person just as does water, air and food.  To place my conversation in a context the following description would help.

 The information in the array is not located in individual points of stimulation, but in the structure of the whole pattern; that is, in higher-order variables. This information is ecological because it shows the way in which the surroundings are disposed in relation to a perceiver’s point of observation. The ecological character is given not only by light itself as a physical energy, but also by the action of the agent. As Gibson claimed, “[a]n affordance, as I said, points two ways, to the environment and to the observer. So does the information to specify an affordance” (J. J. Gibson, 1979/2015, p. 132, emphasis added).

Ecological information is informative of the environment because it specifies the available affordances. ‘Specificity’ refers to the idea by which the presence of ecological information corresponds to the direct perception of affordances.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....02228/full

So it is not the "consciousness" in a physical body, its the information structures that are the "meat" of an adaptation.  They exist in the informational environment and exert influence on outcomes at all levels.  An animal or bacteria with a good active plan for food acquisition has a better chance of survival.

I think that mental activity creates information objects.  I draw a distinction - between consciousness as the focus in generation of organized intentions - and mental activity.  Subconscious activity may be more productive in general, with conscious activity being a smaller, but more decisive process to structure niches for the benefit of an agent.  Subconscious habits have something like momentum. 

Rather than seeing a living agent as primarily a physical being, independently generating meaning, an ecological view is taken.  In that framework -- meaning flows thru a person just as does water, air and food.  To place my conversation in a context the following description would help.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....02228/full

So it is not the "consciousness" in a physical body, its the information structures that are the "meat" of an adaptation.  They exist in the informational environment and exert influence on outcomes at all levels.  An animal or bacteria with a good active plan for food acquisition has a better chance of survival.

So if I understand this correctly information structures are not in some Platonic Realm. Information is ultimately within the same world as the physical body, a reference to the structures that can arise, from and be influenced by, lower levels but in turn also exerts top-down causation.

So an animal with a good plan for survival then, by virtue of its mental ability, passes on its genes? So the mutation is still random but the plan is what determines how these mutations are taken advantage of and thus passed down through generations?

I feel like I'm almost there, as the cusp of understanding, but let me know if I am just off base and going in the wrong direction...

I think that mental activity creates information objects.  I draw a distinction - between consciousness as the focus in generation of organized intentions - and mental activity.  Subconscious activity may be more productive in general, with conscious activity being a smaller, but more decisive process to structure niches for the benefit of an agent.  Subconscious habits have something like momentum. 

Rather than seeing a living agent as primarily a physical being, independently generating meaning, an ecological view is taken.  In that framework -- meaning flows thru a person just as does water, air and food.  To place my conversation in a context the following description would help.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....02228/full

So it is not the "consciousness" in a physical body, its the information structures that are the "meat" of an adaptation.  They exist in the informational environment and exert influence on outcomes at all levels.  An animal or bacteria with a good active plan for food acquisition has a better chance of survival.

I may not be interpreting your words correctly, but it seems to me that creatures anywhere in the spectrum of complexity from bacteria, to primitive invertebrate metazoans like some sort of proto-trilobite, to hippopotamus-like proto-whales do not have the cognitive resources, the intelligence, to form any sort of imaginative plan for instance on an irreducibly complex mechanism to better obtain food, or a bodily mechanism, a system, to defend against predators, or to adapt to a new environment.  Therefore there is no "information structure" that can be selected for -  such imaginative planning inherently requires a high level of cognitive resources, foresight, and imagination. An old saying: there's no free lunch.

Lenski's multi-thousand generational bacteria evolution experiment that I mentioned already is a case in point: Darwinian evolution yielded nothing but genetic devolvement involving genes broken by random mutations that just happened to be adaptive. No new and creative structures irreducibly complex or not. If the mechanism you describe were operating with these millions of bacteria over thousands of generations you would think something new and innovative would have been generated besides broken genes.

So if I understand this correctly information structures are not in some Platonic Realm. Information is ultimately within the same world as the physical body, a reference to the structures that can arise, from and be influenced by, lower levels but in turn also exerts top-down causation.

So an animal with a good plan for survival then, by virtue of its mental ability, passes on its genes? So the mutation is still random but the plan is what determines how these mutations are taken advantage of and thus passed down through generations?

Reality consists of the same manifest environment for the physical and the informational -- with the informational level having congress with the future and past.  Manifest events have a probability of one and the physical is only measured in the time frame of the "now".  Empirical measurements are framed in P=1 events.  Informational transforms that are active change with associated information objects in the future and past.  Events as specific groupings of probability can be measured with a degree of uncertainty.  Plans made with structures from the past and probable structures in the future can be more integrated and capable when generated in the now.

Science can measure the addition of information (both as code and as functional instructions) and the amount of it's integration.  The resultant gain in capability is also firmly modeled math equations (Cp/CpK).

I do not imagine so direct a transform of intentions to genetic code.  The "substance" of informational transfer is changes in the probability of outcomes.  A planned response by a single bird or a flock of birds doesn't change genetics, however the appearance of a successful habit, is observable by others of the species and its pursuit in community is an information object in the environment.

Was early man a fire-starter or did he learn to deal with it because it was in his environment?  Was the first bridge engineering?  Or was a log over a creek simply copied!  Is it the tree that is observed by the eye?  Or is it the mind detecting probability wave present in informational reality?

I may not be interpreting your words correctly, but it seems to me that creatures anywhere in the spectrum of complexity from bacteria, to primitive invertebrate metazoans like some sort of proto-trilobite, to hippopotamus-like proto-whales do not have the cognitive resources, the intelligence, to form any sort of imaginative plan for instance on an irreducibly complex mechanism to better obtain food, or a bodily mechanism, a system, to defend against predators, or to adapt to a new environment.  Therefore there is no "information structure" that can be selected for -  such imaginative planning inherently requires a high level of cognitive resources, foresight, and imagination. An old saying: there's no free lunch.

Darwin and his "ism" are supposed to present a mindless evolution of life and random physical events becoming fixed as genes.

As usual in history - victors write the outcome and Darwin was a victor with his theory in name only.  He believed in mind as a major factor in evolution.  Mental Evolution was published by his protege G. Romanes, with Darwin penning the introduction.  Darwin died and Romanes was excluded from the mainstream.  Darwin's careful work on mind seems lost, if you listen to the propagandists.

Bacteria and single cell organisms are still highly active information processing entities.  My poor prose may better be understood with the following analysis of C. Darwin.  

Although the first dawnings of intelligence, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer,[4] have been developed through the multiplication and co-ordination of reflex actions, and although many of the simpler instincts graduate into reflex actions, and can hardly be distinguished from them, as in the case of young animals sucking, yet the more complex instincts seem to have originated independently of intelligence. I am, however, very far from wishing to deny that instinctive actions may lose their fixed and untaught character, and be replaced by others performed by the aid of the free will.  On the other hand, some intelligent actions, after being performed during several generations, become converted into instincts and are inherited, as when birds on oceanic islands learn to avoid man. These actions may then be said to be degraded in character, for they are no longer performed through reason or from experience. But the greater number of the more complex instincts appear to have been gained in a wholly different manner, through the natural selection of variations of simpler instinctive actions. Such variations appear to arise from the same unknown causes acting on the cerebral organisation, which induce slight variations or individual differences in other parts of the body; and these variations, owing to our ignorance, are often said to arise spontaneously.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Desce...hapter_III

Ok  - Here is what I read:

• Darwin's theory has active features where mind alters purposeful behavior.
  
• Darwin believes that free-will is one of these active features.
  
• Darwin thinks that conscious intelligent actions can be reduced to subconscious structures called instincts; and persist without being a focus of conscious experience.
  
• Darwin thinks that complex instincts evolve from simpler ones and that complexity can be creatively selected from the database of prior instinctual structures.
  
• And the killer app for my theory of mind is Darwin's claim that: "unknown causes" (mental processing of information objects for me) induce an increase in real-world probability of variation in physical structures.  That is NOT random evolution, but spells out a channel for mind to play a role.
  

For a complete review of this assertion {non-random evolution} see: Darwin in the Genome by Lynn Caporale. 

Who would of thunk that charlie d could have presented many of the best arguments for mind having an active role and may be the root of evolution.  This is a bio-evolutionary outlook that Dawkins and Dennett have spent lifetimes trying to deny (and falsely represent some aspects of Darwin's work, imho)

 Caporale presents examples of both non-random and large-scale genomic changes. She describes, for example, how mutational hot spots in genes for vertebrate antibodies can enhance the capabilities of our immune system and how similar hot spots in cone snail toxin genes expand their arsenal of toxic weaponry. Caporale argues that some DNA sequences are more prone to mutational events because of their chemical nature and the biochemistry of DNA replication machinery. She points out that blocks of genetic information can be shuffled within a genome and even passed to the genome of another species. The strength of her book is in collecting and detailing relevant examples from the literature. She maintains throughout that not all mutations are random and that "focused, regulated variation is biochemically possible."

Caporale's idea of "variation-targeting mechanisms" has been criticized for implying foresight in the selection process. She argues,however, that naturalistic mechanisms can explain what appears to be directed purposeful mutation. Caporale offers an approach to working out the molecular and biochemical details, and challenges us to consider the idea that the mechanisms for generating genetic diversity can themselves evolve.

https://ncse.ngo/review-darwin-genome