Saturday 12 March 2022

The fossil record v. Darwin once more.

Digital currency: The future of money?

Analog is back in the game?

Darwinian occultism produces yet another Zombie.

Zombie Science: Miller-Urey Experiment Is Back from the Dead, Barely

David Coppedge

With the flasks, tubes, and sparks, the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953 was too good a propaganda visual to let die. This story of what biologist Jonathan Wells calls zombie science should have died the year it went viral, because Harold Urey and Stanley Miller, both well-informed biochemists, knew well that the formation of a few simple amino acids was a far, far cry from a living cell.

They observed the tar of toxic byproducts that formed in the flask. By trapping out the products they wanted, they committed investigator interference. Scientifically speaking, the Miller experiment was a non-starter. Then later, when the atmosphere they used was called into question, the evolutionary icon was doubly dead.

Now It’s Back

But only twitching on the table. Three geophysicists from the Technical University of Denmark, writing in Geophysical Research Letters, simulated the requirements to light sparks in the assumed prebiotic atmosphere. They used Miller’s original mixture and the revised mixture by Kasting (1993) that was more weakly reducing than Miller’s mixture of hydrogen, methane, and water vapor. The results were not encouraging. The possibility of spark generation is too doubtful to raise the Miller-Urey zombie to walking position.

In the 1950s Miller and Urey performed discharge experiments in a gas mixture resembling the atmosphere of Ancient Earth and showed that a significant amount of prebiotic material was produced, possibly laying the foundation for the further synthesis of the first biomolecules. We perform numerical computer simulations of electron avalanches in the gas mixture used by Miller and Urey as well as in a mixture suggested more recently for the composition of Ancient Earth’s atmosphere 3.8 Ga ago and study the conditions needed for the inception of filamentary discharges. We calculate electron and discharge properties and compare them with results for discharges on Modern Earth…. Our simulations show that discharges in the Miller-Urey mixture incept at lower fields than in Kasting’s mixture and partly on Modern Earth which implies that discharges in the atmosphere of Ancient Earth might have been more challenging to incept than previously thought. [Emphasis added.]

No sparks; no amino acids. No amino acids, no life. Perhaps some molecules would form from UV light or cosmic rays, but those energy sources lack the pizzazz of sparks. The textbook cartoons would be boring without those blue sparks in the flask. Everybody seems to have assumed that sparks in the flask were a good proxy for sparks in a prebiotic atmosphere. One should never assume such a key piece of the story without evidence. These authors believe it “might have been more challenging… than previously thought.”

What Did the Team Accomplish?

It’s not clear what the team accomplished if anything. They didn’t operate a Miller-type setup. They didn’t try instigating discharges in Miller’s strongly reducing atmosphere, nor in the weakly reducing atmosphere revised by Kasting in 1993 to be more plausible for the prebiotic Earth. That atmosphere eliminated the methane and hydrogen from the mix and relied primarily on nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Neither did they try getting sparks to start in a modern Earth atmosphere, although lightning is a common observation to us all. In fact, they admit that they don’t even know how lightning starts in our modern atmosphere.

Since it is known for Modern Earth that the large-scale electric fields in thunderstorms are in the order of 0.1E_k, hence seemingly too low for streamers and subsequently for lightning to occur, it is still an enigma how lightning can occur on Modern Earth (Dubinova et al., 2015; Gurevich & Karashtin, 2013). Thus, although the difference in the streamer inception electric field is rather small, it could potentially make a big difference on how efficiently streamers incept. Nonetheless, it is more difficult to incept streamers as precursors of lightning in the weakly reducing Kasting mixture than in the mixture used by Miller and Urey or in modern day air. On the contrary, in local environments, with a significant contribution of methane and ammonia, it might be easier to incept streamers, to observe discharges and maybe even create prebiotic molecules.

Might? Maybe?

All they did was create a computer model of the requirements for streamer formation that might initiate the avalanche of electrons we call lightning. Once again, they say it was probably more challenging than thought:

We provide a table summarizing the electric fields needed for discharge inception in these different atmospheres. Our simulations show that discharges in the Miller-Urey mixture incept at lower fields than in Kasting’s mixture and partly on Modern Earth which implies that discharges in the atmosphere of Ancient Earth might have been more challenging to incept than previously thought.

Without performing experiments, and without calibrating the conditions required for spark inception, their model is basically useless. So, what did their paper achieve?

PR for Their Work

The only motivation that seems apparent was to get some PR for their work by tying it to the Miller-Urey experiment. In Icons of Evolution (2000), Jonathan Wells summarily executed the Miller-Urey experiment as having any relevance to the origin of life, but it didn’t stay dead. He slew it again in Zombie Science (2017). Now, again, the dead theory makes another appearance in the academic literature of the American Geophysical Union. It’s too popular to let go. Google search on “Miller-Urey” and scroll through dozens of illustrations. The focal point of them all is the spark in the flask.

Use of the wrong atmosphere is just one of an array of showstoppers that kill the Miller-Urey experiment. Others include chirality, probability, damaging cross-reactions, lack of most of the amino acid species that exist in life, and the lack of other requirements for life: a membrane, metabolism, and genetics. As if overkill were needed, this paper removes the assumption that sparks were available to get the celebrated “building blocks of life” in the first place.

The Miller-Urey experiment is dead, dead, dead. Its promoters keep it walking with special effects, not science.

For more on problems with the Miller-Urey experiment, see also:

Thaxton et al., The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy (2020)
Intelligent Design in a Nutshell (2020), Chapter 2
Meyer, Signature in the Cell (2009)
Evolution News, “A New Flaw in the Miller-Urey Experiment, and a Few Old Ones” (2022)
Documentary film, Origin: How Did Life on Earth Begin? by Illustra Media (2016)
Video, Long Story Short: Origin of Life (2021)

Darwin:Prophet of the Alt-wrong?

Ties that Bind: The Alt-Right’s Connections to Social Darwinist Madison Grant and Eugenics

Gary Varner

In his new book Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism, historian Richard Weikart devotes a chapter to explaining the continuing influence of Darwinian racism in American society today, including its connection to the “Alt-Right.” It’s a topic that we’ve covered before at Evolution News, but it deserves more attention.

Unfortunately, in recent years the term Alt-Right has been misused as something of a catch-all for “conservatism.” That’s a slander. Most conservatives have nothing to do with the actual Alt-Right. In reality, the Alt-Right has an ideology of its own, a mix of both left-leaning and right-leaning elements. But their various positions are united by one belief: that the white race is genetically superior. And as Weikart points, they draw toxic inspiration from the claims of Darwinian biology.

Understanding the Alt-Right

In claiming that the white race is superior, Alt-Right articles and podcasts cite certain early 20th-century social Darwinists. Three of these thinkers are Madison Grant, Sir Francis Galton, and Lothrop Stoddard. The last of these three, perhaps a less familiar name, served as a director for Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood.

The ideas of the social Darwinists permeate the Alt-Right ideology. Some years ago Richard Spencer, an Alt-Right writer — most notably recognized for his role in the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” demonstration in 2017 — interviewed thinker and painter Jonathan Bowden on Spencer’s podcast Vanguard. The episode is titled “The E Word: Eugenics & Environmentalism, Madison Grant & Lothrop Stoddard.” During their interview, Spencer and Bowden not only detail the history of the eugenics movement, they defend it, even attempting to connect eugenics with both abortion and environmentalism, using Grant as their justification. They argue that if the Left could only embrace the notion that some men and women are genetically inferior, then they could deal with the environment effectively.

Academic Language and a Harsh Message

During the podcast, Bowden states:

…if one eschews the politics of human rights in a grandstanding and universalist way and sees human identity and glory in very much an individual or localized manner then deep green and ecological ideas have a lot to say to all forms of conservativism that wish to preserve and restore as against that which is transitory and that which is to our end and which is purely and only concerned with human life to the detriment of the ecology without which mankind couldn’t subsist.

These men have a habit of using academic language to mask their harsh message. What he’s basically saying is that if we’d just get rid of this troublesome notion of human rights, we could deal with overpopulation and save the environment.

When it comes to abortion, both Bowden and Spencer consider it a backwards form of eugenics. As Spencer explains, “they [the elites] are in some ways pursuing negative eugenics in the sense that they are certainly much more willing to abort a child with Down syndrome or so on, and that, of course, can be discovered in the womb. In some ways, one could also suggest that eugenics is still living on.”

Bowden adds:

I also think it’s important to realize that essentially what’s happened is that two concepts have been conflated into one another in order to summarily dispatch both. This is the idea of eugenics as against dysgenics. Dysgenics, which is, if you like, the negative side of eugenics whereby you act though as to prevent harm, but you also act as to, in some senses, prevent life through abortion or through selective contraceptive use or through sterilization. The proactive and yet sort of snip-oriented and negative side of eugenics is its really controversial feature. The wholesome side, the building people up, the tonics for the brave sort of side, is one which only the most… nihilistic and sordid Left-winger would be opposed to, because they find nauseous the idea of happy, athletic, intellectually precocious families beaming for the camera in an Osmonds-like way, you know.

Both Bowden and Spencer blame the public’s rejection of eugenics on the move away from Galton’s understanding of Darwinism after the Second World War. Spencer says, “…you were talking about the academic side of this issue and the fact that so many of these researchers who were quite predisposed to Galton, Darwinism, eugenics that switched. Is that part of the so-called Boasian revolution in anthropology? What I mean by that is, of course, Franz Boas, who was a sworn enemy of Madison Grant.”

Bowden affirms Spencer’s suspicion and then adds a revealing statement about the motives behind this switch. He comments, “Yes, I do think it happened in a certain context though. I think that people who supported eugenics found that unless they found a different vocabulary for it their support couldn’t be sustained in polite society.”

Eugenics as a Worthy Practice

Regarding this switch, the two conclude their conversation when Spencer says, “When you had baby boomers and our generation, you were essentially having people who were influenced by Boasian anthropology. They did not think in terms of Galton and let’s call it classical Darwinism. Really those people lost the battle, and this is the reason why eugenics kind of vanished after the Second World War.”

These two think eugenics was a worthy practice and they lament that it is no longer openly used. Spencer summarizes his thoughts on the subject:

What do you think about our unique ability to reclaim conservationism or naturalism and how, much like Grant, that should be a major cause for us, which is to keep the world green and beautiful and to fight things like the terrible overpopulation that you see in some kind of horrifying city like Mexico City or São Paulo? We want quality over quantity, and we want to live on a beautiful Earth.

While venerating Galton and Stoddard, the conversation mostly centers on the legacy of Madison Grant, a New York lawyer who popularized the eugenics movement with his books, including The Passing of the Great Race and The Conquest of a Continent. Here are some samples of his thought:

“…the intelligence and ability of a colored person are in pretty direct proportion to the amount of white blood he has, and…most of the positions of leadership, influence, and prominence in the Negro race are held not by real negroes but by Mulattoes, many of whom have very little Negro blood.” (The Conquest of a Continent)
“Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.” (The Passing of the Great Race)
“Where the environment is too soft and luxurious and no strife is required for survival, not only are weak strains and individuals allowed to survive and encouraged to breed but the strong types also grow fat mentally and physically.” (The Passing of the Great Race)

Clearly, Grant has been an influence on Spencer’s thinking. In that connection, Spencer has a book to recommend, historian Jonathan Spiro’s Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant: “He [Spiro] offers a very useful and rich biography of Grant, which has really influenced my interest in Grant, and one of his major themes is that if you tell someone that Grant is an early environmentalist that’ll usually bring a smile to their face, but if you tell someone he’s also an early eugenicist, that will usually inspire shock and horror. But as Spiro points out, there was no contradiction in Grant’s mind between saving the redwoods and saving the White race.”

Confused Terms

It’s a strange thing to hear these individuals claim they are on the Right while simultaneously affirming abortion, an act considered a form of murder by many conservatives. The reason for this confusion of terms is that Spencer, Bowden, and others on the Alt-Right regard themselves as the Right in the same way Mussolini or Hitler might be considered on the “Right” today. That, however, ignores that Hitler’s platform was, after all, “national socialism.” Conservatism today is not only defined by social issues but by a belief in limited government, and there can be nothing more invasive than eugenics.

It’s important to understand what the Alt-Right believes. They are not just an extreme offshoot of either the Right or the Left. Instead, they have their own ideology based on antiquated ideas from the early 20th century, an ideology heavily influenced by eugenics, which was inspired in turn by — as Spencer puts it, not incorrectly — classical Darwinism.

How Darwinism's ministry of truth warps the origins debate.

Do Scientists Have Freedom to Question Darwinism?

John G. West

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from a chapter in the newly released book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos.

The list of scientists, teachers, students, and others who have faced retaliation or discrimination for their public skepticism of Darwinism is long and growing.

A Fortunate Darwin Critic

At San Francisco State University, tenured biology professor Dean Kenyon was removed from teaching introductory biology classes. Once an influential proponent of Darwinian evolution, Kenyon had come to doubt key parts of Darwin’s theory and expressed those doubts to students in class, including his belief that some biological features exhibited evidence of intelligent design. Kenyon was more fortunate than many academic critics of Darwin. After his plight was publicized by an article in the Wall Street Journal, the university was shamed into reinstating him.¹

Biology professor Caroline Crocker at George Mason University was “barred by her department from teaching both evolution and intelligent design” after committing the crime of mentioning intelligent design in a course on cell biology. “It’s an infringement of academic freedom,” she told the journal Nature.² Subsequently her contract was not renewed.³

Oregon community college instructor Kevin Haley was terminated after it became known that he criticized evolution in his freshman biology classes. Haley’s college refused to state why his contract was not renewed, but some of Haley’s colleagues were upset that students who took his biology class were starting to challenge evolution in their classes.⁴ Before the controversy over evolution, Haley had been regarded as an excellent teacher. Indeed, his former department chair had praised him in glowing terms, saying that students “perceive that he is interested in them. He generates curiosity and stimulates their thinking. Those are things that I think are not always there in a professor.”⁵

Discrimination and Bullying

Scientists outside of biology who express skepticism about Darwinism can also face discrimination and bullying. At Baylor University, mathematician William Dembski was fired as director of an academic center he had founded to explore the idea of intelligent design as an alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution. Eventually his faculty contract was not renewed as well, and he lost his job. Dembski, who holds doctorates from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago, had exemplary academic credentials and publications, but his research center had been strenuously opposed by Baylor’s biology faculty.⁶

Chemistry professor Nancy Bryson was removed from her post as head of the science and math division of Mississippi University for Women after she delivered a lecture to honors students about some of the scientific weaknesses of chemical and biological evolution. “I was harshly attacked by Darwinist colleagues,” she explained later. “…students at my college got the message very clearly, do not ask any questions about Darwinism.”⁷

Blacklisted for Openness

Sometimes scientists can find themselves blacklisted if they merely express openness or sympathy to a critical examination of Darwinism. Astronomer Martin Gaskell was a top applicant to become the head of an observatory at the University of Kentucky. In the words of one university faculty member there, “his qualifications…stand far above those of any other applicant.”⁸ But Gaskell was ultimately rejected for the job after the biology faculty waged an internal war against his hiring. Why did they want to prevent him from getting the job? First, Gaskell was perceived by other faculty to be “potentially evangelical.”⁹ Worse, although he identified himself as a supporter of evolution, in online notes for a science and faith talk, Gaskell respectfully discussed the views of intelligent design proponents and acknowledged that modern evolutionary theory had unresolved problems — just like any scientific theory.

The Gaskell case illustrates how some Darwinian biologists are not content to stop dissent over their theory within their own field. They want to censor disagreement with Darwin in other scientific disciplines as well. Indeed, sometimes they try to silence other scientists from raising the issue of intelligent design outside of biology without any reference to evolution. Eric Hedin was an assistant professor of physics at Ball State University. Like Gaskell, he had a long list of peer-reviewed science publications.¹⁰ For many years, he taught an interdisciplinary honors class at Ball State called “The Boundaries of Science,” which explored the limits of science.

During one small part of the course, Hedin discussed the debate over intelligent design in physics and cosmology — not biology.¹¹ Hedin’s course received positive student reviews.¹² However, atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago and the Freedom from Religion Foundation filed complaints.¹³ Ball State then violated its own procedures and appointed an ad hoc committee stacked with avowed critics of intelligent design, including two who spoke at a previous Darwin Day conference organized by the Ball State Freethought Alliance,¹⁴ a group whose “original goal,” according to its president, was “belittling religion.”¹⁵ Hedin’s class was eventually cancelled by Ball State. In addition, the university president issued a campus speech code not only banning professors from covering intelligent design in science classes but also from expressing support for the concept in social science and humanities classes.¹⁶

Next, “Do Non-Scientists Have Freedom to Question Darwinism?”

Notes

Stephen Meyer, “Danger: Indoctrination, a Scopes Trial for the 90s,” The Wall Street Journal (December 6, 1993), https://www.discovery.org/a/93/(accessed November 24, 2020).
Geoff Brumfiel, “Intelligent design: Who has designs on your students’ minds?,” Nature 434 (April 28, 2005), 1062-1065.
See “Intelligent Design and Academic Freedom,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio (November 10, 2005).
See Gordon Gregory, “Biology instructor’s doctrine draws fire,” OregonLive.com (February 18, 2000); Gordon Gregory, “Creationist instructor likely will lose his job,” OregonLive.com (March 28, 2000); Julie Foster, “Biology professor forced out; Pointed to flaws in theory of evolution, encouraged critical thinking,” WorldNetDaily.com (April 14, 2000), https://web.archive.org/web/20010427122836/http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17856 (accessed November 25, 2020).
Haley’s former department chair Bruce McClelland, quoted in Gregory, “Biology instructor’s doctrine draws fire.”
Fred Heeren, “The Lynching of Bill Dembski: Scientists say the jury is out—so let the hanging begin,” The American Spectator 33 (November 2000), 44-51.
Testimony of Nancy Bryson before the Texas State Board of Education, Transcript of the Public Hearing Before the Texas State Board of Education, September 10, 2003, Austin, Texas (Austin, TX: Chapman Court Reporting Service, 2003), 504-505.
Email from University of Kentucky physicist Thomas Troland, quoted in Casey Luskin, “E-mails in Gaskell Case Show That Darwin Skeptics Need Not Apply to the University of Kentucky,” Evolution News and Views (February 10, 2011), https://evolutionnews.org/2011/02/e-mails_in_gaskell_case_show_t/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
Casey Luskin, “Evidence of Discrimination Against Martin Gaskell Due to His Views on Evolution,” Evolution News and Views (December 15, 2010), https://evolutionnews.org/2010/12/evidence_of_discrimination_aga/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
“Refereed Publications [of Eric Hedin],” Ball State University, https://web.archive.org/web/20130526183917/http://cms.bsu.edu/-/media/WWW/DepartmentalContent/Physics/PDFs/Hedin/PublicationsHedin%20(3).pdf (accessed November 24, 2020).
John G. West, “Misrepresenting the Facts about Eric Hedin’s ‘Reading List’,” Evolution News and Views (July 11, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/07/misrepresenting/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
Joshua Youngkin, “What Does Eric Hedin Really Teach? Self-Professed Agnostic Speaks Out About ‘Boundaries of Science’ Seminar,” Evolution News and Views (August 2, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/08/what_does_eric/ (accessed November 24, 2020); Joshua Youngkin, “Hedin Witness #3: ‘This Course Made Me a Better Learner,’” Evolution News and Views (August 9, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/08/hedin_witness_3/ (accessed November 24, 2020); Joshua Youngkin, “Dr. Hedin’s Student Could Teach Ball State University a Thing or Two,” Evolution News and Views (July 16, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/07/what_happened_i/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
David Klinghoffer, “At Ball State University, Intimidation Campaign Against Physicist Gets Troubling Results,” Evolution News and Views (May 22, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/05/at_ball_state_u/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
John G. West, “Questions Raised About Impartiality of Panel Reviewing Ball State University Professor’s Course,” Evolution News and Views (June 25, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/06/review_panel_or/ (accessed November 24, 2020); Joshua Youngkin, “Indiana Professors Question Ball State University’s Disregard For Rules on Academic Freedom,” Evolution News and Views (August 25, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/08/indiana_profess/ (accessed November 24, 2020); John G. West, “Clarifying the Issues At Ball State: Some Questions and Answers,” Evolution News and Views (September 13, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/09/clarifying_the_/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
“Atheist Rift!!,” BSU Freethought Alliance: The Official Blog of Ball State University Freethought Alliance (October 23, 2009), http://freethoughtbsu.blogspot.com/2009/10/atheist-rift.html (accessed November 24, 2020).
John G. West, “Ball State President’s Orwellian Attack on Academic Freedom,” Evolution News and Views (August 1, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/08/ball_state_pres/ (accessed November 24, 2020).

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