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by Gerry Zeitlin
from
OpenSeti Website
In recent years, the
unoccupied intellectual middle ground between evolutionary science
and creationism has begun to fill from both directions.
Evolutionists have spawned astrobiology and varieties
of
panspermia, in which organic compounds (mainstream
version) or even whole cells (modern or "strong" panspermia
per Hoyle and Wickramasinghe) fall to Earth after
riding on cosmic detritus.
Creationists have found greater academic
acceptance by dropping all reference to the "creator" but
retaining the function of Intelligent Design. And new
theories of evolution are ready to embrace teleological mechanisms
embedded in the DNA molecule.
Something had to be done. "Evolution" has failed in two major
ways. First, as a scientific discipline, it has been guilty of
selecting its very data to support its favored hypothesis. If this
seems difficult to believe, take the time to review the massive
Forbidden Archaeology - The Hidden History of
the Human Race (Cremo and Thompson, 1994).
A highly condensed and updated summary of this book is found in
Human Devolution (Cremo,
2003), Chapter 2. Whereas, officially, anatomically modern
humans appeared on the scene about 100,000 years ago, these books
present a great deal of documented evidence of the existence of
modern humans on this planet going back hundreds of millions of
years.
This evidence has been systematically and even ruthlessly
blocked and purged from the scientific literature.
Chapter 3 of Human Devolution also treats the evidence
for extreme antiquity of nonhuman species,
"showing
that flowering plants and insects existed on earth far earlier than
most Darwinists now believe possible."
These data are quite inconsistent with the standard picture of
step-by-step evolution.
And that is the first major failure of evolution:
it is a theory designed to explain a body of evidence that
does not even represent a valid picture of the fossil data.
Evolution’s second major failure is that it does not
even explain the body of data that it has selected. It is illogical
and is riddled with glaring flaws. This has long been pointed out
without any resort to religious scriptures or "revealed"
knowledge. See, for example, the review by UC Berkeley Law
Professor Phillip Johnson (1993), and the devastating
arguments of
Lloyd Pye in his
Essay on
Carpenter Genes.
As Pye explains, evolution cannot occur
through random mutations because a viable mutation would require
synchronized changes in genes from BOTH the father and the
mother.
"The scientific
disciplines that were part of the evolutionary synthesis are all
nonmolecular. Yet for the Darwinian theory of
evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular
structure of life."
- Prof. of Biochemistry Michael Behe
Lehigh University
Michael Behe
(1996) completely undercuts the Darwinists by demonstrating
that they have been working on the wrong level ever since Darwin
made his scientific observations, and even the neo-Darwinist
reorganization of evolution science in the 1950s missed the boat
entirely:
evolution, if it occurred at all, would have
to take place on the molecular levels of biochemistry, not
the macroscopic level of organs and other body structures - and
biochemistry itself did not exist as a branch of science until
after neo-Darwinism had been launched.
Furthermore, neo-Darwinists have never even until now taken
much account of the biomolecular foundations of
biological life.
For example, the "simple" structures known as cilia
and flagella, used by cells in swimming and moving
liquids, have been the subject of thousands of scientific papers,
but there is hardly one that attempts to explain how
they could have evolved. That is because they, like virtually all
life forms, have an incredibly complex microbiological structure,
and it is in this structure that random mutation and natural
selection would have had to take place.
Here Behe introduces his concept of "irreducible
complexity", asserting that the molecular structures he
describes simply could not work if any part of them were missing or
even imperfect in its design.
Today, evolution hasn’t a leg to stand on. Evolutionists
haven’t admitted it yet. And for good reason: the stakes are very
high. Evolution remains the ground on which many biological and life
sciences stand; biologists and other scientists feel it must be
defended not only on behalf of their various fields but also to
prevent the Bible-thumpers and the promoters of the supernatural
from storming in -- a fearful prospect indeed. But Intelligent
Design (ID), as argued by Behe and
colleagues, is not necessarily creationism. It has no
preconceptions as to who or what the designer might be.
Can it truly be so?
What about all those depictions of man’s
descent from hominid ancestors we’ve seen in our school
textbooks since childhood, and the well-researched evolution of the
modern horse from eohippus, the development of vertebrates,
and all these things that we know our life scientists know?"
It is argued by some in the ID movement
that these evolutionary sequences are actually fictions.
Berkeley-educated biologist Jonathan Wells (2000), calls
these images and depictions
Icons of Evolution. His book is
devoted to showing that each and every one of them is a
deliberate deception.
A useful resource for those interested in learning more about ID would be the anthology
Mere Creation, a collection of
investigations by nineteen expert academics in wide ranging fields,
edited by William Dembski (1998). 25
Publications pro and con the concept of ID continue to
appear at a lively rate. The
Book Review section of the Journal of
Scientific Exploration Spring 2003 issue contains
critiques of several new books in the field. A scan of this material
leads to the general impression that ID advocates do
tend to have a creationist agenda but have dressed up their
subject to make a better impression in polite company. On the other
hand, some of their critics seem to object on the ground that
their own religious ideas are offended by ID.
Since ID does not explicitly identify the designer,
the framework supports the cause of the old-style creationists.
But advocates of the notion of Earth colonization by ETI
are also within the scope. But - setting aside for the moment the
obvious question of who designed ETI - new concepts of
intelligence in nature have come onto the scene.
In their
Gaia
Hypothesis, for example, James Lovelock
and Lynn Margulis had all the Earth’s species, by means of
their biological activity, engineering their environment so as to
advance "evolution".
And they do this according to a sort of
vast wisdom intrinsic to the Earth - Gaia
- herself and all of her species. The actual locus of the wisdom
or intelligence was not given, and in fact was suggested to
be distributed.
In his
Cosmic Ancestry theory, Brig
Klyce combines strong panspermia with the
teleological aspects of the Gaia Hypothesis, to
propose that evolution on Earth depends on genetic programs that
come from space.
Quoting from his website’s Introduction:
Cosmic
Ancestry implies, we find, that life can only descend
from ancestors that were at least as highly evolved as itself.
And it means, we believe, that there can be no origin of life
from nonliving matter in the finite past. Without supernatural
intervention, therefore, we conclude that life must have
always existed. Evidence for Cosmic Ancestry,
in the form of fossilized microscopic life found in
meteorites, is accumulating rapidly.
Evidence of a strikingly different kind is provided by Jeremy
Narby (1998). While conducting what might be called "experiential
anthropological studies" with South American native
cultures, Narby found that certain plants having physical
forms resembling the DNA molecule, when eaten, actually
bring the experiencer into direct contact and conversation with
intelligent serpent forms who claim to BE DNA,
and who tell stories of how they arrived here by journeying
through space.
Narby received this information
without foreknowledge that the native people using those plants
had long been given the same information.
Now we have Rhawn
Joseph (2001) who offers in his
Astrobiology, the Origin of Life, and the
Death of Darwinism a detailed and breathtaking theory of
how DNA achieves its incredible work.
His
Evolutionary Metamorphosis thesis in a nutshell:
"The genetic seeds
of life swarm throughout the cosmos, and some of these genetic "seeds"
fell to Earth, as well as on other planets. And these
genetic "seeds" contained the instructions for the
metamorphosis of all life, including woman and man.
"DNA acts to purposefully modify the environment,
which acts on gene selection, so as to fulfill specific genetic
goals: the dispersal and activation of silent DNA
and the replication of life forms that long ago lived on other
planets."
In his model, the "seeds"
contain the entire programmed evolutionary sequence that leads to
human and beyond. I take the liberty of listing for you the points
of Joseph’s thesis given in his Foreword:
-
The
age and origin of the universe is unknown.
-
Life first originated on other planets,
perhaps tens of billions or even trillions upon trillions of
years ago.
-
DNA is capable of learning,
remembering, and acting intelligently.
-
Cosmic collisions are commonplace, not
only between meteors and planets, but between entire galaxies.
-
The seeds of life swarm throughout
the cosmos and living creatures contained in planetary debris
have been repeatedly hurtled to other worlds.
-
These creatures and their DNA
then labored to alter the environment of these worlds so as to
engineer their own evolution.
-
Creatures cast upon planets already
swarming with life may have swapped DNA thus
increasing their genetic storehouse of genetic information.
-
The first creatures on Earth
(and their DNA), came from other planets.
-
DNA acts on and modifies the environment.
-
The modified environment acts on gene selection to
activate "silent" genes and "silent" genetic
traits which exist a priori.
-
Silent genes can be passed down to subsequent
generations and to diverging species.
-
Once the environment is sufficiently engineered,
these silent genes and the traits they code for
may be expressed in distinct and separate species.
-
Genes can also be transferred laterally and
horizontally between species, so that different species can come
to possess the same gene and the same trait.
-
As these "silent"
genes/ traits are
inherited and were passed down from ancestral species, then
these genes and traits must have been inherited from creatures
that "evolved" on other planets.
-
Genetic evidence indicates that evolution has
progressed in a highly predictable "molecular clock-like"
fashion.
-
The progressive "evolution" of
increasingly
complex and intelligent species in a step-wise progressive
fashion, and genetic evidence as reported by the human
genome project, indicates that "evolution" has
unfolded in accordance with specific and highly regulated
genetic instructions.
-
Conclusion: DNA acts to modify the
environment to engineer its own evolution and the activation of
traits and genes which exist a priori; i.e. "evolutionary
metamorphosis."
Cosmic Ancestry
and Evolutionary Metamorphosis do not explain the
ultimate source of life in the universe.
However, they push it back
into the indefinitely deep past, and enable life to propagate from a
single beginning somewhere in the near-infinite cosmos. In this,
these theories provide the time and space for the infinitely
improbable to actually happen.
They further provide the means for
genetically engineering worlds in their multitude by building the
instructions into the single DNA molecule.
Who might
have accomplished this?
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