https://www.thecollegefix.com/famed-yale-computer-science-professor-quits-believing-darwins-theories/

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Gelernter acknowledges "I am attacking their religion and I don't blame them for being all head up, it is a big issue for them."

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"Religion is imparted, more than anything else, by the parents to the children," he said. "And young people are brought up as little Darwinists. Kids I see running around New Haven are all Darwinists. The students in my class, they're all Darwinsts. I am not hopeful."

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It's sadly pathetic how many anti-creationists have perhaps through ignorance perpetuated modern day white supremacism. Interest academia has lopped off the part of Darwinism that paints the virtue of natural selection as it leads to favored races in the preserved struggle for life.

They have not convinced me but I see no reason why any academic study with the assumption of design should be so perilous for one's academic career or reputation. I do think universities have certainly created religious like followings of certain biases and leanings that have greatly damaged those institutions and their reputation.

I have no personal issue with the idea of it being all evolution from the start, or all designed by a higher power, or even being programmed into the simulation that we might be in. None of that would really bother me. But I think many others are so dug in to world views that they cannot risk considering that they could be wrong.

Tribal warfare

That and most the posters on this board no how this one ends

Saw this story shared elsewhere. It's in queue to read. Curious about his position.

It's a pretty good criticism. Protein synthesis is much more complicated than we originally understood it to be. Any evolution theory needs to address this, or theorists at least need to acknowledge difficulty of new protein synthesis as a weakness. No way it was random. Maybe there was a reason for directed evolution of new proteins based on a natural pathway? Would be nice to hear a counter argument as opposed to fingers in ears.

Two thoughts:

First, just because you're an expert in one thing doesn't make you an expert in everything. See also: physicists talking about theology. The evidence for common ancestry and the phylogenetic tree is pretty overwhelming.

Second, the only that annoys me about discussing evolution is randomness. You're on solid footing saying that mutation plus selection plus incomprehensible amounts of time leads to greater variety of life. However, saying either mutation or selection is random is a philosophical statement. The entire idea of randomness is a very complicated philosophical construct with a whole host of unprovable axioms.

The criticism is that the amount of time elapsed is not as incomprehensible as the complexity of protein synthesis. The argument is that the maths don't work for randomness as an explanation.

Either:

1) he is wrong about the complexity of protein synthesis; or
2) there is something more than randomness happening in the mutation cycle.

Im open to other explanations, but randomness plus time is seeming less and less likely to be the right answer.

Seems to me that advocating for an intelligent "director" of evolution only begs the question of how this intelligent being itself came into existence -- was he/she created by an even higher power, evolved under the direction of a higher power, spontaneously came into being, etc??? And then, what about that higher power? Seems like kicking the can down the road. We are making great progress unfolding the evolutionary path that brought us here, but the "how" and "why" questions, if they even have answers we can comprehend, will unfortunately probably remain mysteries.

Is there no other possibility? It's either random DNA mutation or God?

Not sure.

AstroAg17 said:

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Nobody would argue that it's truly random. However, it's pseudorandom.

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OK. Cool. What does that mean? What is pseudorandom? Why is it pseudorandom? What is deciding the randomness path?

There are a lot of legitimate questions here.

I get the idea, but to me it's a weak argument. Since we haven't solved protein folding, we really don't know anything about these probabilities. It may be incredibly easy for a couple mutations to completely change the form of a protein such that it interacts with different molecules. Or it could be next to impossible or anywhere in between. We just don't know, so his argument about probability is rooted in ignorance

ramblin_ag02 said:

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I get the idea, but to me it's a weak argument. Since we haven't solved protein folding, we really don't know anything about these probabilities. It may be incredibly easy for a couple mutations to completely change the form of a protein such that it interacts with different molecules. Or it could be next to impossible or anywhere in between. We just don't know, so his argument about probability is rooted in ignorance

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But the reverse is true, as well, right? The idea that random mutation has achieved our present biosphere without "solving protein folding" is also rooted in ignorance?

Assume for a minute that, based on experience with genetic programming with Crisp-R and other such tools, biologists have discovered that this is extremely more difficult than we previously understood. Doesn't that deserve some addional research and questioning our original positions on this topic? Or is Darwin the unquestionable Bible?

I don't see why you think it's a challenge to evolution. You are questioning the exact mechanism and how random it is. There is no question that life evolved in this. There is no doubt of the fossil record and human ancestry and other creatures as well. It's just a matter of how the precise details work.

I guess you could try and use this to argue that god constantly poked a gene here and there for billions of years. I'm not sure why thats more or less divine than setting in motion a string of events that leads to a desired outcome.

Either way it seems evolution is a peculiar choice for how to bring about life on a planet if you end goals and desires are focused on the last few ten thousand years.

Not really sure what you're trying to say. The sciences of biochemistry and genetics are pretty solid. Every living organism uses RNA, left handed proteins and right handed sugars. This strongly points to a single origin for life on Earth. Add that to the organisms that have DNA showing similar organisms with similar DNA, and ancestors with DNA that seems to be precursor to current similar animals.

All the evidence we have points to common ancestry with "older" species differentiating into "newer" species over the age of epochs. Whether this process is random or a function of an incomprehensible higher power is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. Belief in God is never incompatible with available evidence.

ramblin_ag02 said:

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All the evidence we have points to common ancestry with "older" species differentiating into "newer" species over the age of epochs. Whether this process is random or a function of an incomprehensible higher power is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. Belief in God is never incompatible with available evidence.

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OK. Let's assume for sake of argument that there is strong evidence that there are points of common ancestry in the geological record, as you say. Evolution science that I learned in college says that random mutations in DNA over millions of years lead to new species.

If new research suggests this is highly improbable, that new speciation is not likely to be due to randomness, what is the correct response?

Shouldn't we be searching for the natural pathway that did result in new speciation? Shouldn't we update the spreadsheet to say that the theory has a weakness related to genetic that should be researched? If it was a natural process, shouldn't we be looking for it?

Ignoring the issue that we don't understand the pathway seems to me to be bad science. Like underpants gnomes with one step in the process being a bunch of ???????

Also, I'm not advocating a religious explanation at all in this thread. Bringing that up is a distraction.

Fair enough about the religious aspect. Let's say we solve protein folding, and we find out that it is very easy to render a protein non-functional with a single mutation, and it is very difficult to change a protein into a functional but different protein with only a few mutations. Let's say it's so difficult that the odds are astronomically against this happening based on known historical rates of mutation. I think that's basically the argument being made anyway, but let's give it some real evidence.

So what does that imply? To me, that implies that living systems at some point developed machinery that can create new functional proteins more quickly than expected. For instance, maybe an organelle thag mixes a matches small and large proteins until it finds two that interact. Then it places the large on the membrane and makes the small one into a hormone. That would be amazing, would revolutionize biology, it would win Nobel Prizes, and it would make the discoverers famous and perhaps very wealthy. It would not, however, disprove anything we already know about biology, genetics, common ancestry, or speciation over time.

As far as fossil records, I'm the wrong person to comment. My only relevant education and experience to this conversation is my biochem degree. The only thing I know about geology is the basics of rockhounding and cave formation

Interesting thought.

Why would the biome have lost that ability? The ability of the organisms cellular systems to experiment more with new proteins? Seems like going backwards in the survival of the fittest idea.

I'm not too versed in the cambien explosion, but there is a period where we have a whole lot of new species in a very short amount of time. I'm not sure what is different when it comes to biology between now and then, but everyone that looks at it closely concludes there was something different going on.

Figuring out what that might have been would likely lead to a huge leap in knowledge. Like difference between Newton and Einstein.

Well I'm not a fan of "survival of the fittest" terminology. First, it's tautological. The fittest survive therefore the survivors are the fittest. It also implies some direction to diversification and selection that means late organisms are more fit than earlier ones. Which makes no sense. Humans would not be more fit than protobacteria in Earth's early methane atmosphere, for instance.

To answer the question though, it was entirely speculative. We don't know if such a system ever existed or if it does now. Modern eukaryotic cells are ridiculously complicated. I've heard one despairing biochemist call them a black box where the more you know the more you find that you don't know.

Seems like what we have here is some folks looking at a story of creation in a book and deciding that since they don't believe in that, God doesn't exist at all. They then look for materialistic explanations of all that is and work backwards.

Took him long enough...The Cambrian Explosion "nukes" Darwinism...