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Forbidden! Darwin debunker must be stopped!

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<em>Teapot</em> Cobalt Blue From science writer Daniel Engber at Five Thirty-Eight:

Who Will Debunk The Debunkers?

Sutton, a criminology professor at Nottingham Trent University, started his career of doubting very young: He remembers being told when he was still a boy that all his favorite rock stars on BBC’s “Top of the Pops” were lip-synching and that some weren’t even playing their guitars. Soon he began to wonder at the depths of this deception. Could the members of Led Zeppelin be in on this conspiracy? Was Jimmy Page a lie? Since then, Sutton told me via email, “I have always been concerned with establishing the veracity of what is presented as true, and what is something else.”

But he went too far. He came undone.

Patchy AusstechformenIn the last few years, Sutton has himself embarked on another journey to the depths, this one far more treacherous than the ones he’s made before. The stakes were low when he was hunting something trivial, the supermyth of Popeye’s spinach; now Sutton has been digging in more sacred ground: the legacy of the great scientific hero and champion of the skeptics, Charles Darwin. In 2014, after spending a year working 18-hour days, seven days a week, Sutton published his most extensive work to date, a 600-page broadside on a cherished story of discovery. He called it “Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret.”

Sutton’s allegations are explosive. He claims to have found irrefutable proof that neither Darwin nor Alfred Russel Wallace deserves the credit for the theory of natural selection, but rather that they stole the idea – consciously or not – from a wealthy Scotsman and forest-management expert named Patrick Matthew. “I think both Darwin and Wallace were at the very least
sloppy,” he told me. Elsewhere he’s been somewhat less diplomatic: “In my opinion Charles Darwin committed the greatest known science fraud in history by plagiarizing Matthew’s” hypothesis, he told the Telegraph. “Let’s face the painful facts,” Sutton also wrote. “Darwin was a liar. Plain and simple.”
More.

Gosh, in the age of the criminalization of dissent, will the authorities need to think up a special fiendish punishment for him?

Maybe this rethinking evolution thing is going too far if icons are toppling like snow loads falling off the roof…

On the other hand, when it happens, just get out the shovel.

See also: What the fossils told us in their own words

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Comments
I'm not sure I share Sutton's outrage. Our current society's outrage about plagiarism was not always shared in the past. Often ideas were exchanged, discussed, reviewed, put forward. Whoever expressed the idea best, or at the right time, or managed to get published, or was already well known, or otherwise got lucky, got the credit. Should Darwin have done a better job of acknowledging where some of his ideas came from? Sure. But the real problem with Darwin's claims about evolution is not that he stole the idea from someone else. The real problem is that, insofar as it attempts to explain the grand trajectory of nature's history, the conventional evolutionary explanation is a laughable joke. That is the real problem with Darwin's theory.Eric Anderson
May 13, 2016
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It's great that we are beginning to reclaim the history from Darwin's Boys.News
May 5, 2016
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Some may be interested that Matthew - like Wallace - was firmly convinced that natural selection reflected a divine lawlike, and benevolent design. He had a rather deistic approach to this, but is far closer in today's scene to Denton than to Dawkins. We did a piece on him on The Hump of the Camel this time last year.Jon Garvey
May 3, 2016
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So, instead of all of our universities teaching Darwinism, they would be teaching Mathewism. How does this change anything other than some words in some textbooks?ziggy lorenc
May 2, 2016
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I doubt Darwin lied or stole any ideas from Scots. When I read Darwin I see his big idea , in his mind also, was the concept of how macro results come from micro steps. He does this for corals, geology, human/animal expressions(not so much about evolution) his celebrating Spencer in his discovery of musics origins and so on. Darwin was greatly convinced all things could be broken down into atom small steps. That was his equation. Biology stuff was just an example of this equation. Wiki hints at this too. Darwin ideas were just small steps equals big results. He did this before his evo ideas. He did it after. Some right and some wrong. I suggest people read his book on expressions to learn his presumption here. Its not about evolution itself. I think this cat in Britain needs to query his own hypothesis.Robert Byers
May 2, 2016
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From the horse's mouth
"I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once gathered much valuable fruit from my father's trees and hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit." - Charles Darwin - The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I - pg 14 http://charles-darwin.classic-literature.co.uk/the-life-and-letters-of-charles-darwin-volume-i/ebook-page-14.asp
Moreover, regardless of whether Darwin discovered natural selection of merely popularized it, natural selection is grossly inadequate as the 'designer substitute' it was imagined to be. Even many evolutionists themselves (such as Moran) admit that the effect of natural selection in the history of life is negligible.
Haldane's Dilemma Excerpt: Haldane was the first to recognize there was a cost to selection which limited what it realistically could be expected to do. He did not fully realize that his thinking would create major problems for evolutionary theory. He calculated that in man it would take 6 million years to fix just 1,000 mutations (assuming 20 years per generation).,,, Man and chimp differ by at least 150 million nucleotides representing at least 40 million hypothetical mutations (Britten, 2002). So if man evolved from a chimp-like creature, then during that process there were at least 20 million mutations fixed within the human lineage (40 million divided by 2), yet natural selection could only have selected for 1,000 of those. All the rest would have had to been fixed by random drift - creating millions of nearly-neutral deleterious mutations. This would not just have made us inferior to our chimp-like ancestors - it surely would have killed us. Since Haldane's dilemma there have been a number of efforts to sweep the problem under the rug, but the problem is still exactly the same. ReMine (1993, 2005) has extensively reviewed the problem, and has analyzed it using an entirely different mathematical formulation - but has obtained identical results. John Sanford PhD. - "Genetic Entropy and The Mystery of the Genome" - pg. 159-160 Kimura's Quandary Excerpt: Kimura realized that Haldane was correct,,, He developed his neutral theory in response to this overwhelming evolutionary problem. Paradoxically, his theory led him to believe that most mutations are unselectable, and therefore,,, most 'evolution' must be independent of selection! Because he was totally committed to the primary axiom (neo-Darwinism), Kimura apparently never considered his cost arguments could most rationally be used to argue against the Axiom's (neo-Darwinism's) very validity. John Sanford PhD. - "Genetic Entropy and The Mystery of the Genome" - pg. 161 - 162 A graph featuring 'Kimura's Distribution' is shown in the following video: Evolution vs Genetic Entropy - Andy McIntosh - video - 59:27 miute mark https://youtu.be/-GLJE4FbHnk?t=3567 The abject failure of Natural Selection on two levels of physical reality – video (2016) https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/vb.100000088262100/1135217836491148/?type=2&theater Genetic Entropy - references to several numerical simulations analysing the feasibility of natural selection and random mutations and finding them severely wanting ,,, (via John Sanford and company) http://www.geneticentropy.org/#!properties/ctzx Can Purifying Natural Selection Preserve Biological Information? - May 2013 - Paul Gibson, John R. Baumgardner, Wesley H. Brewer, John C. Sanford In conclusion, numerical simulation shows that realistic levels of biological noise result in a high selection threshold. This results in the ongoing accumulation of low-impact deleterious mutations, with deleterious mutation count per individual increasing linearly over time. Even in very long experiments (more than 100,000 generations), slightly deleterious alleles accumulate steadily, causing eventual extinction. These findings provide independent validation of previous analytical and simulation studies [2–13]. Previous concerns about the problem of accumulation of nearly neutral mutations are strongly supported by our analysis. Indeed, when numerical simulations incorporate realistic levels of biological noise, our analyses indicate that the problem is much more severe than has been acknowledged, and that the large majority of deleterious mutations become invisible to the selection process.,,, http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789814508728_0010    Using Numerical Simulation to Test the Validity of Neo-Darwinian Theory - 2008 Abstract: Evolutionary genetic theory has a series of apparent “fatal flaws” which are well known to population geneticists, but which have not been effectively communicated to other scientists or the public. These fatal flaws have been recognized by leaders in the field for many decades—based upon logic and mathematical formulations. However population geneticists have generally been very reluctant to openly acknowledge these theoretical problems, and a cloud of confusion has come to surround each issue. Numerical simulation provides a definitive tool for empirically testing the reality of these fatal flaws and can resolve the confusion. The program Mendel’s Accountant (Mendel) was developed for this purpose, and it is the first biologically-realistic forward-time population genetics numerical simulation program. This new program is a powerful research and teaching tool. When any reasonable set of biological parameters are used, Mendel provides overwhelming empirical evidence that all of the “fatal flaws” inherent in evolutionary genetic theory are real. This leaves evolutionary genetic theory effectively falsified—with a degree of certainty which should satisfy any reasonable and open-minded person. http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Using-Numerical-Simulation-to-Test-the-Validity-of-Neo-Darwinian-Theory.pdf On Enzymes and Teleology - Ann Gauger - July 19, 2012 Excerpt: People have been saying for years, "Of course evolution isn't random, it's directed by natural selection. It's not chance, it's chance and necessity." But in recent years the rhetoric has changed. Now evolution is constrained. Not all options are open, and natural selection is not the major player, it's the happenstance of genetic drift that drives change. But somehow it all happens anyway, and evolution gets the credit. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/on_enzymes_and062391.html Majestic Ascent: Berlinski on Darwin on Trial - David Berlinski - November 2011 Excerpt: The publication in 1983 of Motoo Kimura's The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution consolidated ideas that Kimura had introduced in the late 1960s. On the molecular level, evolution is entirely stochastic, and if it proceeds at all, it proceeds by drift along a leaves-and-current model. Kimura's theories left the emergence of complex biological structures an enigma, but they played an important role in the local economy of belief. They allowed biologists to affirm that they welcomed responsible criticism. "A critique of neo-Darwinism," the Dutch biologist Gert Korthof boasted, "can be incorporated into neo-Darwinism if there is evidence and a good theory, which contributes to the progress of science." By this standard, if the Archangel Gabriel were to accept personal responsibility for the Cambrian explosion, his views would be widely described as neo-Darwinian. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/berlinski_on_darwin_on_trial053171.html (With the adoption of the 'neutral theory' of evolution by prominent Darwinists, and the casting aside of Natural Selection as a major player in evolution),,, "One wonders what would have become of evolution had Darwin originally claimed that it was simply the accumulation of random, neutral variations that generated all of the deeply complex, organized, interdependent structures we find in biology? Would we even know his name today? What exactly is Darwin really famous for now? Advancing a really popular, disproven idea (of Natural Selection), along the lines of Luminiferous Aether? Without the erroneous but powerful meme of “survival of the fittest” to act as an opiate for the Victorian intelligentsia and as a rationale for 20th century fascism, how might history have proceeded under the influence of the less vitriolic maxim, “Survival of the Happenstance”?" - William J Murray Here is a Completely Different Way of Doing Science - Cornelius Hunter PhD. - April 2012 Excerpt: But how then could evolution proceed if mutations were just neutral? The idea was that neutral mutations would accrue until finally an earthquake, comet, volcano or some such would cause a major environmental shift which suddenly could make use of all those neutral mutations. Suddenly, those old mutations went from goat-to-hero, providing just the designs that were needed to cope with the new environmental challenge. It was another example of the incredible serendipity that evolutionists call upon. Too good to be true? Not for evolutionists. The neutral theory became quite popular in the literature. The idea that mutations were not brimming with cool innovations but were mostly bad or at best neutral, for some, went from an anathema to orthodoxy. And the idea that those neutral mutations would later magically provide the needed innovations became another evolutionary just-so story, told with conviction as though it was a scientific finding. Another problem with the theory of neutral molecular evolution is that it made even more obvious the awkward question of where these genes came from in the first place. http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2012/04/here-is-completely-different-way-of.html
bornagain77
May 2, 2016
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