More an explaining away of design than an explaining of origins?

 Dan Stern Cardinale: Comparative Biology, Invincible Ignorance

Michael Behe

Current mechanistic accounts of the unfolding of life can all be styled as Potemkin theories of evolution, because a façade of similarities among creatures that can reasonably be ascribed to mere common descent is used to hide the utter lack of a plausible mechanism to account for the most fantastic differences. That recent argument of mine at Evolution News1 has triggered a calumnious response2 from Daniel Stern Cardinale, an evolutionary biologist and lecturer at Rutgers University who posts on a YouTube channel called Creation Myths. Here I’ll show that Stern Cardinale’s nearly thirty-minute video response itself nicely confirms my argument. In brief, he mistakes descriptive studies of comparative biology for mechanistic studies of evolution, and he exhibits a seemingly invincible ignorance (meaning, in this context, an apparently complete inability to comprehend)3 of the most basic features of life that need to be explained.

Early, Petty, Misguided

An early, petty, misguided complaint of Stern Cardinale’s concerns the title of my piece at Evolution News, “Darwinism Is a Potemkin Theory of Evolution.” The “Darwinism” label is misleading, he grouses, because of all the progress that’s been made since 1859; only design proponents use the woefully outdated term.

He should tell that to J. B. S. Haldane, who invented the “darwin” as a unit of evolutionary change in 1949.4Tell it to Theodosius Dobzhansky, who wrote “On Some Fundamental Concepts of Darwinian Biology” in 1968.5 To Richard Dawkins, author of the essay “Universal Darwinism” in 1983.6 To National Geographic, which in 2004 asked “Was Darwin Wrong?”7 Or to the authors of a recent paper in Nature Chemical Biology, who investigated “directed evolution and Darwinian adaptation.”8

The words Darwinism, Darwinian, darwin, neo-Darwinian, and more are all cognates of the name of the man who proposed that adaptive evolution occurs mainly by natural selection acting on heritable random variation. They are routinely used to refer to that process, whether or not the selection occurs in subtler ways than Darwin knew or the variation by processes unknown to him (which isn’t hard, since Darwin and his contemporaries were clueless about how inheritance occurs). Exactly no one reading my piece would think it concerned only 19th-century evolutionary thought.

Genomics

Stern Cardinale gestures at major advances in modern biology, including all that has been learned about molecular biology and especially the amazing recent progress in DNA sequencing technology, which in turn allows the study of genomics and related topics. He then pretends that I am trying to hide those widely known advances (which I have discussed extensively in my books) from the yokels who read Evolution News. He concludes (reluctantly, of course) that I am a lying liar.9

Stern Cardinale seems oblivious to the fact that by themselves gene and genome sequences concern only common descent — that is, the similarities that I wrote were the easy part of Darwin’s mechanism. Uncovering a sequence of DNA in one organism that is more or less similar to that in another organism may be evidence that the two shared a common ancestor, but by itself it says nothing about how the ancestral sequence arose, how it came to differ in the descendants, or especially whether it explains the “cool new features” — the major differences — that I said constituted the “big mystery,” the “killer question” of life. By itself, genomics is essentially an exercise in comparative biology, noting in what ways the genes of various organisms are similar to and different from each other — nice for drawing phylogenetic trees, but indicating nothing about what process is building the major functional features of life.

Changes Happen “Through Evolution”

Stern Cardinale claims that a modern understanding of biology easily shows how transformations can occur. Riffing off a thought experiment in my essay where I write that “for some odd reason” descendants of separate lineages of a common ancestor developed thorns on their feet versus spiral fingers, Stern Cardinale asks in high dudgeon, “What do you mean ‘for some odd reason,’ Mike? We know how changes happen — through evolution.”

So, the lecturer instructs us, changes happen … through evolution! Feeling enlightened yet? That profound insight makes one wonder why Darwin worried so much about the vertebrate eye and other “organs of extreme perfection.”

But wait, there’s more. Stern Cardinale continues, “You’ve got recombination. You’ve got mutation. You’ve got horizontal gene transfer. We know how new things occur in a lineage.” Later in the video he adds gene duplication and some other processes. Yet, (leaving aside horizontal gene transfer) for explaining the development of complex functional structures, simply ticking off molecular mechanisms that can alter the genetic patrimony of a species isn’t any improvement on Darwin’s bare 19th-century invocation of “variation” as the fodder on which selection acts. Darwin would speculate that unidentified random heritable variations allowed the development of whatever he was writing about — maybe thorns on the feet of one lineage, spiral fingers in another, and the vertebrate eye in a third. Stern Cardinale’s list just indicates in effect that unidentified variation can be supplied by various now-known processes — and leaves it at that.10

Precise, Detailed Questions

But how does a lineage go from random variation to a specific major functional feature (say, thorns on feet, spiral fingers, or the vertebrate eye)? To move beyond Just-So storytelling, a purportedly modern scientific evolutionary explanation would have to answer precise, detailed questions such as: Exactly what point mutations, what gene duplications, what recombination events caused each step in the particular proposed pathway leading to a particular, identifiable, actual complex functional feature? What factors favored each step of the change at both the macroscopic and molecular levels? What factors opposed each step of the change but might be overcome? What was the selection coefficient for each step? What was the population size of the species? Are all these events statistically consistent with random changes? Were simpler adaptations available — such as the much more frequent adaptive degradative changes I discussed in Darwin Devolves — that would have short-circuited more complex pathways? Is there experimental evidence that changes building a complex structure can occur in the absence of investigator interference? (Spoiler alert — no, there isn’t.) And many other questions.

Wouldn’t answering all those questions be really hard? Of course! But one can’t brush aside critical questions and simply assume one’s theory is correct. That’s a prescription for living in a dream world — one that is based on wish fulfillment, not empirical facts. Physicists worked for decades and built billion-dollar accelerators, all to test whether the Higgs boson existed or not. If instead they complained it was too hard to experimentally confirm their theories, and just decided to assume their latest ideas were true, then that would effectively be the intellectual end of their discipline.

In the absence of such precise, detailed, pertinent studies, mechanistic evolution remains a Potemkin theory, with its façade of similarities obscuring the absence of knowledge of how complex functional structures arise.

An Entire Day

Stern Cardinale loses it at the point in my essay where I note that Darwin-boosters go mute when asked how complex new traits evolve (such as, say, those of bats or whales). The utter mendacity, he snorts (in less polite words)! Why, “I teach evolutionary biology … and we spend an entire day of class on how do new traits evolve.”

So … of the approximately forty lecture-days in a typical semester-length course, Stern Cardinale spends a grand total of one — maybe an hour, maybe two or three percent of the course — on the most basic, most fascinating, most contentious question in the field. I think that little fact can help us understand a couple of points about why it is so difficult for Darwin-enthusiasts such as himself to comprehend Darwin-skeptics such as myself.

The first point is that the state of Stern Cardinale’s syllabus roughly reflects the state of the field in general, in that thinking rigorously about pathways for the origin of complex functional traits is at best a tiny, essentially negligible part of the academic field that goes by the name of “evolutionary biology.” The majority of biologists simply assume that Darwinian or other unguided mechanistic processes somehow account for major changes, but almost no one even attempts to demonstrate that they can.

In his video, Stern Cardinale explicitly denies this. He claims there is a large amount of work being done to explain how macroevolution occurs. To show his good faith, Stern Cardinale double-dares the viewer to enter “bat wing evolution” on Google Scholar, to find all the many books and papers on the topic. In a wonderfully clarifying video, my Discovery Institute colleague Cornelius Hunter does just that — and turns up a raft of comparative studies of organisms that simply ascribe differences to presumptively Darwinian evolutionary processes.11 None of the papers even tries to show that an unguided evolutionary mechanism could accomplish the transformation.

For example, in a typical paper (with the juicy title “Making a bat: The developmental basis of bat evolution”12) that Hunter analyzed, among similar sorts of results mouse embryo development is compared to bat embryo development. Quite unsurprisingly, the study shows that the time for limb development is greater in bat vs mice embryos, and transcription factors regulating the process have a larger range in bats (Figure 2 of reference 12, “Differences in signaling centers between bat and mouse limb development”).

Interesting work. Yet, as the content of that and other papers he invited us to peruse demonstrates, evolutionary biologists in the mold of Stern Cardinale seem unable to grasp that the general statement “A differs from B in a certain aspect” does not warrant the conclusion “A differs from B in a certain aspect because of Darwinian processes.” And it most certainly does not justify the grossly extrapolated conclusion that a complex new structure of which the aspect is a tiny part was built by Darwinian processes.

The statement in my essay where I wrote, that for questions of how major complex functions could be constructed, “Darwin boosters go mute” greatly disturbed Stern Cardinale. Undoubtedly he thought of many interesting papers he had read or heard about, written by persons he perhaps admires, and that led to his Google Scholar challenge. But, of course, by “mute” I meant that the Darwin boosters had nothing pertinent to say. It’s not that there haven’t been many good studies of the comparative biology of organisms that, as evidenced by their similarities, likely descended from a common ancestor. There just haven’t been any studies showing that such a phenomenon could be driven by a Darwinian process.13

The Second Point

This leads to the second point. By working diligently on the 97 percent to 98 percent of other topics covered in Stern Cardinale’s evolution course syllabus, most practitioners of evolutionary biology convince themselves that the field as a whole simply must have a handle on a mechanism for how life developed. After all, with all that hard work being done by really smart people, somebody must know! So they sincerely believe that folks who say otherwise are ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked like me).

Regrettably, as with the blind spot of the vertebrate retina that some Darwinists invoke to avoid thinking seriously about how undirected mutation and selection could build a real eye, many evolutionary biologists themselves have a blind spot for what it would take to provide an actual mechanistic evolutionary explanation for a real complex system. Instead of working to address that question, they immerse themselves in studies of the comparative biology of many marvelous aspects of life, or microevolutionary processes, or abstract models, or other interesting topics. They cannot comprehend that they are actually oblivious to how complex functional systems arose.

Notes

https://evolutionnews.org/2025/04/darwinism-is-a-potemkin-theory-of-evolution/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RttY_vjW25w

In honor of the election of Pope Leo XIV, I’m borrowing this poignant phrase from the Catholic lexicon. The meaning I give the phrase here is a shade different from that in theological circles, but it’s close enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincible_and_invincible_ignoranc

Haldane, J.B.S. 1949. Suggestions as to quantitative measurement of rates of evolution. Evolution 3, 51-56.

Dobzhansky, T. 1968. On Some Fundamental Concepts of Darwinian Biology, in: Dobzhansky, T., Hecht, M.K., Steere, W.C. (Eds.), Evolutionary Biology: Volume 2. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp. 1-34.

Dawkins, R. (1983) Universal Darwinism. In: Evolution from molecules to man, ed. D. S. Bendall. Cambridge University Press.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/was-darwin-wrong

Ma, L. and Lin, Y. 2025. Orthogonal RNA replication enables directed evolution and Darwinian adaptation in mammalian cells. Nature Chemical Biology 21, 451-463

As the video proceeds, Stern Cardinale’s reluctance to question my honesty morphs into enthusiasm. Near the end, he latches onto a sentence near the finish of my essay: “As a succession of sages over the centuries wrestled futilely with the question of what mechanism could possibly account for the elegant structures of life, various monikers have been attached to the notion of evolution: Lamarck’s theory, Darwin’s theory, neo-Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.” From that sentence, Stern Cardinale reasons on camera that, not only does he himself know that the names refer to different mechanisms, he knows Behe knows they refer to different mechanisms — yet Behe dishonestly lumps them together. Stern Cardinale states that he doesn’t want to insult my intelligence, so instead he insults my character. Since I lump those disparate ideas together, he declares, then it’s clear I am intentionally lying. Stern Cardinale needs to work on his reading comprehension. The quoted sentence plainly states that sages wrestled with the question of a mechanism, which is demonstrated by the fact that Lamarck, Darwin, etc. proposed different mechanisms. The sentence also plainly states that the mechanisms all concern the notion of evolution (i.e., Lamarckian evolution, neo-Darwinian evolution, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, etc.), which of course all of them do. The obvious point being made is that none of the various mechanisms ever proposed for evolution has successfully explained the complex functional structures of life. (I hate to be so pedantic, but apparently it’s necessary for some people.) Stern Cardinale mistakes his own incomprehension for someone else’s dishonesty. That is sadly typical of internet culture. Nonetheless, it is reprehensible conduct for an academic. It is certainly no behavior for an instructor to model to his students.

https://evolutionnews.org/2025/05/professor-stern-cardinale-stumbles-on-bat-wingevolution

Sadier, A., Urban, D.J., Anthwal, N., Howenstine, A.O., Sinha, I., Sears, K.E., 2021. Making a bat: The developmental basis of bat evolution. Genet Mol Biol 43, e20190146.

That same kind of misdirection was featured in the 2005 Kitzmiller versus Dover federal trial to which Stern Cardinale alludes. In a courtroom stunt, twenty years ago attorneys for the plaintiffs dumped a pile of books and papers on the witness stand where I was sitting to show all the wonderful work that was being done on the evolution of the immune system (not the blood clotting cascade, as Stern Cardinale mistakenly states). However, just as with the bat wing literature, nothing in the pile contained any serious detailed Darwinian proposals for how the immune system developed, only comparative studies and speculation. The distinction was lost on the judge, a college political-science major and former head of the state liquor control board. Today, twenty years after the trial and thirty years after the publication of Darwin’s Black Box, the situation remains unchanged. For discussions of the trial, the clotting cascade, immune system, and many other topics, see my responses-to-critics book, A Mousetrap for Darwin.

The king of titans is a human chess engine?

 

Now man is also a privileged observer?

 

Renewable energy's new wave?

 

Darwinism just does not add up.

 

The King of Titans conducts a psyop?

 

JEHOVAH'S "folly" defeats man's "wisdom"

 

Titans in the arena.

 

On bringing teleology in from the cold

 

The look of a Lamb with the voice of a dragon?

 

There isn't enough serendipity to power Darwinism?

 Lost In (Search) Space: Why Randomness Challenges Neo-Darwinian Theory

Andrew McDiarmid

On a classic episode of ID the Future, Dr. Paul Nelson talks with Dr. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, retired geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany, about randomness in natural selection and why randomness is such a controversial topic.

Dr. Lönnig argues that randomness is an inescapable component of natural selection, particularly within the neo-Darwinian framework. He contends that the immense number of offspring produced by many organisms results in a vast elimination of individuals through random chance, not necessarily due to superior fitness, especially during juvenile stages. Lönnig suggests that the idea of randomness as a primary driver for the origin of complex structures is unintuitive and implausible when considering the intricate design of living things: “To explain them by an endless series of accidental mutations,” says Dr. Lönnig, “doesn’t seem reasonable…” These remarks between Drs. Nelson and Lönnig serve to highlight the controversy surrounding randomness in evolutionary explanations and its perceived conflict with the appearance of design in biology. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Those pesky missing links again?

 

The Titan in winter?

 

Neanderthals might be smarter than darwinists?

 Slow-Witted? Neanderthals Invented Their Own Tech — Didn’t Copy

Denyse O Leary

Here is another instance of Neanderthals, once thought to be comparatively slow-witted, taking the lead in developing a technology. At Ars Technica, science writer Kiona N. Smith notes:

Archaeologists recently unearthed a bone projectile point someone dropped on a cave floor between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago — which, based on its location, means that said someone must have been a Neanderthal.

The point (or in paleoarchaeologist Liubov V. Golovanova and colleagues’ super-technical archaeological terms, “a unique pointy bone artifact”) is the oldest bone tip from a hunting weapon ever found in Europe. It’s also evidence that Neanderthals figured out how to shape bone into smooth, aerodynamic projectiles on their own, without needing to copy those upstart Homo sapiens. Along with the bone tools, jewelry, and even rope that archaeologists have found at other Neanderthal sites, the projectile is one more clue pointing to the fact that Neanderthals were actually pretty sharp. 

“NEANDERTHALS INVENTED THEIR OWN BONE WEAPON TECHNOLOGY BY 80,000 YEARS AGO,” MAY 2, 2025

Not Grandpa’s Neanderthal Anymore

The bone tip was found in Mezmaiskaya Cave (pictured at the top) in the Caucasus Mountains. From the paper’s Abstract:

The results suggest an independent invention of bone-tipped hunting weapons by Neanderthals in Europe long before the arrival of Upper Paleolithic modern humans to the continent, and also show that the production technology of bone-tipped hunting weapons used by Neanderthals was in the nascent level in comparison to those used and introduced to Eurasia by modern humans. 

LIUBOV V. GOLOVANOVA ET AL, ON THE MOUSTERIAN ORIGIN OF BONE-TIPPED HUNTING WEAPONS IN EUROPE: EVIDENCE FROM MEZMAISKAYA CAVE, NORTH CAUCASUS, JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE (2025). DOI: 10.1016/J.JAS.2025.106223

Science writer Bob Yirka comments at Phys.org, “The finding of the spear tip upends theories suggesting that Neanderthals never advanced past stone tools. It also shows, the team suggests, that Neanderthals were able to plan ahead, not only in making the tool, but in the way it was used.”

Neanderthals cannot be the missing link that many paleontologists are looking for. But if the human mind has no history, there is no missing link.

The fall of reductionism foreseen?

 Flannery: What Werner Heisenberg Foresaw

Plato's Revenge

The new bookPlato's Revenge : The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer, details in accessible form the thinking of biologist Richard Sternberg. But others before Dr. Sternberg had also foreseen the recognition of Platonic forms as realities in modern science. Historian of science Michael Flannery cites quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg as an example

mathematician-turned-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of Western philosophy consists of a “series of footnotes to Plato.” Now what Whitehead said of philosophy may be applied to science. Plato’s Revenge is about the teleologically ordered biological systems theory that Richard “Rick” Sternberg calls the immaterial genome. It is an ancient story that dates back to the atomists on the one hand and the teleologists on the other — Leucippus vs. Anaxagoras. The argument between reductionist evolutionists like Charles Darwin and design-oriented evolutionists like Alfred Russel Wallace harkens to these pre-Socratic sources, proving King Solomon’s wise adage, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

With Darwin the triumph of chance and necessity was considered complete. But one of the greatest teleological proponents of all history, Plato, now has his revenge as we find that design and purpose have won the day. The quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg understood this, saying, “I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact these smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.” Now Sternberg, as told eloquently by David Klinghoffer, expresses this in the language of life. This book unites the best elements of metaphysics with cutting-edge science to put the threadbare materialist reductionisms of the neo-Darwinists to shame. [Emphasis added.]

MICHAEL A. FLANNERY, AUTHOR OF NATURE’S PROPHET: ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE AND HIS EVOLUTION FROM NATURAL SELECTION TO NATURAL THEOLOGY AND AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN POET-PHILOSOPHER: THE THOUGHT OF JOHN ELOF BOODIN IN HIS TIME AND OURS

Get your copy of Plato’s Revenge now and find more information and endorsements at Discovery Institute Press.

Richard Sternberg's body blow to reductionism

 Spooked by Sternberg: From the Introduction to Plato’s Revenge

David Klinghoffer

Editor’s note: We are glad to offer an excerpt from the first pages of the new book from Discovery Institute Press, Plato's Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer.

My view is not the view that most people have of intelligent design.

RICHARD STERNBERG

When I first heard biologist Richard Sternberg describe his immaterial genome hypothesis, reviving the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato in a modern and scientific context, another biologist on hand took in her breath. “If that’s true,” she said, “it changes everything.” I felt similarly. The idea spooked me. All familiar thinking about the genome assumes that it is, of course, purely material: the twisting strands of DNA and a few other physical structures in the cell. The proponents of intelligent design (ID) have, in large part, accepted this premise and argued according to its terms.

Sternberg goes further. He argues — sometimes from common-sensical and accessible evidence and sometimes from highly technical mathematical and biological ­ realities — that the material resources of the physically instantiated portion of the genome are woefully inadequate to shape life from generation to generation. The conclusion still gives me a shiver: An immaterial source exists, in company with DNA and the other material sources of biological information. That source extends not only beyond us, but beyond physical reality.

A Meeting in Seattle

I vividly recall the meeting. It was 2012, a time of great strain in my life. In a small conference room in Seattle, several of us, including scientists and ­ non-scientists like me, gathered to listen to Sternberg sketch an argument he had been developing, rooted in his observation that there simply is not enough information physically in the ­ cell — including the DNA and epigenetic (from the Greek, meaning beyond genetic) ­sources — to account for the development of an organism. According to him, this finding applied not only to the more complex organisms, such as whales and humans, but also to the relatively simple ones, such as yeast.

He also spoke of those who had influenced ­ him — in particular, theoretical biologist Robert Rosen (1934–1998) and the men who had first devised the idea of a gene. As Sternberg explained, they saw it in terms that might not be material.

The nature of genetics and heredity is inherently of more intimate interest to some people than are many other scientific topics. The law of gravity says nothing about me as a person, except how fast I would fall if pushed off a tall building. Heredity promises to say much about who I am. As I am writing this, I have just put a tube of spit in the mail to the DNA ancestry company 23andMe. On the top of the test kit you get from Amazon is the message to the customer: “Welcome to You.”

Siddhartha Mukherjee, who teaches medicine at Columbia University, begins his book The Gene: An Intimate History by detailing why the subject is painfully personal for him: Behind his narrative of scholarly discovery lies his father’s family with its history of a mental illness, schizophrenia. In that family history he is himself implicated, as are any children he might have. “Madness,” he writes, “has been among the Mukherjees for at least two generations.” It is “buried, like toxic waste,” in the genetic inheritance.

In 2012, heredity was on my mind. That year, my birth mother, Harriet Lund, had come to live near me in the Seattle area, bringing emotional turbulence with her. She was suffering from dementia and, with it, episodes of rage and paranoia. It was at this time she told me that, in Los Angeles in 1965, my birth father, George Thomas, raped her. And this was how I was conceived.

The Crucial Point

She was ­ Swedish-born, from a long line of Lutheran pastors. She was a social worker at the time, and George, a Mayflower descendant from Kansas, was her supervisor. I had first met her in 1993 and, charmed, wrote a book about her in relationship to my conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Yet she had not told me the crucial point about George Thomas until 2012, right around the time I first heard ­ Sternberg’s immaterial genome idea. Harriet sounded perfectly lucid when she said it: “Your father raped me! You’re the son of a rapist!”

Later, after Harriet had already slipped away, present in her body but not in her mind and thus incapable of answering questions, a cousin of hers contacted me. The cousin revealed, with credible details, that Harriet had kept another secret as well: Harriet’s own ­ father — my grandfather, the Swedish filmmaker Oscar A. C. ­ Lund — had sexually molested Harriet when she was a girl.

Before she became ill, Harriet had wanted to save me from the truth about my heredity. Only in the throes of dementia did she tell me the point about my birth ­ father. Now I knew it all. As they put it at 23andMe, welcome to you. That is the first reason that Sternberg’s discussion moved me. 

There was something else about Sternberg that struck me. Given that he is a man decorated with two PhDs in ­ biology — one in molecular (evolutionary) genetics and another in mathematical ­ biology — and has held a scientific post at the Smithsonian National Museum, it’s natural to expect him to have little interest in classical history. Here, surely, is a man oriented toward science, natural history, and the vanguard of discovery. But when you meet him in person, you quickly sense that a more complex description will be required. He is a man as interested in the history of science and philosophy as he is in the latest scientific evidence and ideas.

I confess that I find this very relatable. As a college student at Brown, studying Greek and Latin, I was narrowly diverted from an academic career in comparative literature. After graduation I was set to start in September in the Classics Department at Columbia to work towards a PhD. That summer, though, I was offered a job as assistant literary editor at William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.

A Form of Archaeology

I deferred grad school for the coming academic year but then never went. The journalism virus had infected me. Yet I continued to find the Greeks, the picture of life that they offered, and their difficult language enchanting. More than this, I have remained fascinated by intellectual life as a form of archaeology, digging for insight and wisdom in ancient sources.

My children grew up hearing me say many times over that there are two kinds of people. There are those who see modern opinions as the product of an ­ upward-driving, almost teleological evolutionary process, with a kind of natural selection picking out the very best concepts from what has come before: the more modern, the better.

And then there are others like me who look around at contemporary existence, with its increasing surrender to mental illness as a philosophy of life, and conclude just the opposite. Jewish tradition calls this yeridat ha’dorot, the devolution of the generations. Human beings are not getting wiser. This is not only an axiom but is evident just from observing the world around you.

So I was naturally sympathetic to Sternberg, for though he grounds his argument for the immaterial genome in the latest discoveries of molecular biology, he is also by temperament sufficiently suspicious of novelty that he mined the history of philosophy and science to excavate intimations and intellectual forbears of his argument. In the process he turned up a line of thinkers and scientists from Plato to Rosen.

Starlink being disruptively disrupting?

 

The irreducible complexity of Logos vs. Darwinism

 Communication, in Human Life and Beyond: An Irreducibly Complex Design

Eric Hedin

Communication is something that we can easily take for granted, and yet this pervasive attribute of living things represents bedrock evidence for intelligent design.

Communication, to be effective, always includes three features.

Expression

Reception

Comprehension

Effective communication necessitates and relies upon the operation of all three features. A lack of any one of these causes communication to fail. In short, effective communication is irreducibly complex.

When we refer to communication, we usually imagine people talking and listening, or someone reading what another has written, or maybe we’re listening to a music performance. Beyond ourselves, however, communication saturates the animal kingdom in myriads forms. Insects also communicate. Even within biological organisms, at the cellular level, communication forms an integral part of sustaining our physical being.

The Example of Blood Pressure

For instance, the physiology controlling blood pressure within our circulatory system utilizes all three features of communication. Complex hormonal chemicals, such as epinephrin and angiotensin, when emitted, interact with sensors and receptors throughout our bodies to regulate blood pressure and maintain it within required tolerances. Communication occurs unconsciously, but without it, we’d go unconscious!

Let’s look in more detail at the form of communication we’re most familiar with — human speech. Creating sounds with vocal chords, pharynx, tongue, mouth, and lips is just the first step in the communication process. The multitasking capabilities of the pharynx have been highlighted in a previous post by Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann.

The pharynx affords us the dual abilities to breathe and swallow food and water, but it does much more. It affords the ability for speech, language, and tonal activities like lyrical speech and singing. The percussion and acoustic shaping of the tongue, teeth, throat, oral and nasal cavities, and most of the other parts of the pharynx, are absolutely required for the nuanced communication that’s essential to the human experience.

All the coordinated anatomy that allows us to form sounds corresponding to words would be wasted and in vain if we didn’t also possess a marvelously attuned sense of hearing. Even a cursory description of the delicate structures of the ear required for us to hear sounds over a thousand-fold range of acoustic vibrations reveals intricately interrelated details surpassing human engineering abilities. 

More than Anatomy

And yet, hearing is much more than anatomical structures precisely arranged to transform acoustic vibrations to electrical nerve impulses. We must also have the ability to interpret impulses in the auditory nerve, to comprehend the electrical signals channeling to our brains, for any communication to occur.

The brain takes signals, and turns them into words and sentences and, then eventually, into ideas. In a few tenths of a second, a sound from your ear can become an idea in your mind. Your ears and brain need to work together to make this happen properly.

The complexity of interpreting auditory signals within the brain has challenged our understanding.

For neuroscientists, human hearing is a process full of unanswered questions. How does the brain translate sounds — vibrations that travel through the air — into the patterns of neural activity that we recognize as speech, or laughter, or the footsteps of an approaching friend?

Independent Complex Systems 

Perhaps we let this incredible phenomenon of communication go unappreciated by virtue of its familiarity to us. Three independent complex systems are required: speech, hearing, and cognitive interpretation. Having (or, to use the evolutionary view, evolving) one feature provides no guarantee the other two will arise. No partial benefit to communication comes from, say, speech and comprehension without hearing. Or hearing and comprehension without speech. All three features of communication are needed. Each of the features entail specific, complex biochemical and neurological functionality. Together, the three essential components of communication comprise a system of irreducibly complex systems.

In the animal kingdom, we can recognize many examples of communication. Even though squirrels may not be discussing politics or theories of cosmology, they use a variety of vocalizations for their own benefit.

Vocal communication is an important method squirrels (Sciuridae) use to transfer information from one individual to others….vocal communication is important to the development, reproduction, and survival of squirrels…

Most research emphasizes the evolutionary origin of animal communication, citing its obvious benefit for enhancing survival. While the survival benefit of communication ability should be obvious, the irreducible complexity of any communication system defies explanation from evolution.

The independent complex features required for effective human communication are mirrored in animal communication (expression, reception, comprehension), and they even appear in the plant world. For example, research indicates that trees engage in communication.

[Trees] are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.

The national park service reports:

It has been known for at least a couple of decades that trees and plants can communicate by releasing volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Again, an irreducibly complex system is involved in arboreal communication: the message must be expressed and received. But this is not enough — the message must produce the intended result, otherwise the whole system is a waste.

Considering again the example of physiological communication within the body, the importance of this process for life has not been lost on the scientific community, expressed with the presupposition of evolution.

In the process of evolutionary history, advancement of the life as a group wouldn’t be possible without cells, tissues and systems communicating with each other with specific communication mechanisms.

Neither has the interconnected necessity of features of successful communication gone unnoticed.

Theory predicts that for a signal to evolve, both the sender(s) and receiver(s) should benefit from their interaction. Thus, there should be tight coevolution between signal production and subsequent perception and response.

In the process of evolutionary history, advancement of the life as a group wouldn’t be possible without cells, tissues and systems communicating with each other with specific communication mechanisms.

Neither has the interconnected necessity of features of successful communication gone unnoticed.

Theory predicts that for a signal to evolve, both the sender(s) and receiver(s) should benefit from their interaction. Thus, there should be tight coevolution between signal production and subsequent perception and response.

Suspending Disbelief

How is it possible to assume that the myriad forms of sophisticated communication between and within living things just happened to evolve? How can one conclude that each essential feature happened to come online in parallel, through undirected processes whose only raison d’être is enhanced procreation? Doesn’t such a hypothesis require an unbearable suspension of disbelief?

The implication of the irreducible nature of communication is clear, but by holding the wrong assumptions it’s possible to hear the signal and miss the message.

Fake it till you make it(or not)

 

The science against reductionism.

 Plato’s Revenge: An Interview with David Klinghoffer

Andrew McDiarmid

You’re familiar with the genetic revolution — the discovery that physical structures in the cell, including DNA and RNA, shape every organism. But we are now overdue for another and more profound revolution in science, one you’ve probably heard very little about. Recent findings reveal that genetic and even epigenetic sources alone cannot account for the rich dynamism of life — not even close. Some other informational source is required. On a new episode of ID the Future, science writer and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer speaks with me about his new book Plato's revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome. A little book about a very big idea, it tells the story of the scientist, Dr. Richard Sternberg, who has spent the last two decades bringing together cutting-edge molecular biology, higher mathematics, and common-sense reasoning to flesh out this potentially revolutionary new idea.

Intelligent Design in Real Time

The immaterial genome hypothesis is a very old one, sketched by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato in his dialogue Timaeus over two millennia ago. But aspects of it are very new too, confirmed by the latest scientific discoveries about the genome. And although the past figures into this story prominently, it’s very much a theory of the present, affecting all of us, as well as every developing organism, at this very moment. Klinghoffer explains: “We are accustomed to thinking of intelligent design as having happened in historical time…And it has. But Sternberg’s thesis really takes intelligent design to a different level. It shows design operating in real time, operating at this moment in every cell in your body.”

Also discussed: a useful analogy to help you wrap your head around the immateriality of the genome, a glimpse into the long line of intellectual forbears behind Sternberg’s idea, and some thoughts from Klinghoffer on what you’ll get out of reading this user-friendly and concise volume. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Henry Ford's real sucessor?

 

Cold fusion again,but they mean it this time(?)

 

Enduring to the end.

 Matthew ch.24:13NKJV"But he who endures to the end shall be saved. "

Am I tired of waiting for JEHOVAH'S promises? No I am not. You see I have already receved much of what JEHOVAH has promised for those proving loyal to their oath to him,

1Corinthians ch.2:9,10NLT"That is what the Scriptures mean when they say, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.But it was to us that God revealed these things by his Spirit. For his Spirit searches out everything and shows us God’s deep secrets."

JEHOVAH Does not require a blind faith,true faith requires the whole mind at least as much as the whole heart,JEHOVAH'S Spirit engages both the intellect and the moral/spiritual sense.

Luke ch.10:27NIV"He answered, “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your MIND’ ..."

Those who work hard on an intimate relationship with JEHOVAH are kindly blessed by him with residence in a spiritual paradise,a condition of mental ,moral and spiritual excellence/abundance,which is a token of the essence of the coming paradise.

Psalm ch.36:10NIV"Pour out your unfailing love on those who love you; give justice to those with honest hearts."

We appreciate JEHOVAH'S Past and present fulfillments of his promises,sacred service has proved a source of joy and peace in the past and the present and we do not doubt that it will continue to prove so,as for the end,my pledge to my divine benefactor is one of eternal service there is no end to my loyalty.

The king of Titans supresses yet another uprising.

 

AI overlords settle a score

 

On designed intelligence

 Can We Credit Human Creativity to Blind Evolution?

Evolution News

Does the evolution of brain chemistry explain novels, speeches, and innovative ideas? Pat Flynn explored that critical question with Dr. Eric Holloway and Professor Robert J. Marks in a recent episode of the Mind Matters podcast. Delving into a chapter from their book Minding the Brain, they focused on the “information cost” of creativity. They argue that the complexity involved in generating meaningful phrases surpasses the computational resources of the universe. That is a challenge to naturalistic explanations and suggests a need for an external source of creativity.

Defining Creativity

Creativity is defined through the lens of the Lovelace test, proposed by Selmer Bringsjord, which posits that a creative act by a computer must exceed the intent or explanation of its programmer. Dr. Marks emphasizes that artificial intelligence, including large language models, operates within the bounds of programmed instructions, lacking true creativity.

Dr. Holloway distinguishes creativity from randomness. Creativity cannot be reduced to probabilistic distributions because random processes lack the intentionality required for meaningful output. This distinction sets the stage for questioning whether evolutionary processes, often equated with randomness, can account for human creativity.

The Information Cost of Meaning

Mountain climbing is a useful metaphor to illustrate the challenge of generating meaningful phrases. The “summit” represents a meaningful phrase, and the “climb” represents the process of reaching it through random selection of letters from a 27-character alphabet (including spaces). Meaning is broadly defined as any string of letters corresponding to words in a dictionary.

The authors argue that creating meaningful phrases requires an extraordinarily high amount of information. They calculate that even with the universe’s computational capacity — estimated at 10^244 bits based on Planck cubes and Planck time units — only a 268-character phrase could be generated randomly. Even hypothesizing parallel universes (up to 10^1000) would only marginally increase this number to 1,380 characters, underscoring the exponential difficulty of the task.

The Role of Active Information

Active information is introduced as the guidance needed to navigate the metaphorical mountain. Without it, random processes are as likely to succeed as any other path, per the No Free Lunch theorem.

Dr. Marks illustrates this with an analogy: finding an Easter egg in Wyoming. Without accurate guidance, the search is futile. An active information source like “you are getting warmer” or “you are getting colder” is needed to find the egg.

If we use the mountain climbing metaphor instead, active information is like an escalator on the side of the mountain that lets you reach the summit more easily.

Metaphysical Considerations

The  discussion also touches on a metaphysical argument by philosopher Richard Taylor (1919‒2003), who argued that meaning cannot arise from random processes. Using the example of rocks forming the phrase “Welcome to Wales” by chance, Taylor argues that such an arrangement, if truly random, lacks intentionality and thus cannot convey meaning. Even if random processes could produce such a meaningful arrangement, the absence of a mind behind it negates its semantic content. Creativity requires a non-random, intentional source.

Implications for Creativity’s Source

The findings challenge naturalistic accounts of creativity, suggesting that the ability to generate meaningful phrases exceeds the universe’s computational resources. The authors propose that human creativity, suffused with semantic and intentional content, points to a non-material or external source of active information.

The need for active information implies an intelligent design, potentially guiding evolutionary processes or directly enabling human creative capacities.

Take Away

The Mind Matters podcast discussion casts doubt on the ability of evolutionary processes to account for human creativity. By demonstrating the immense information cost of even simple meaningful phrases and the necessity of active information, Holloway and Marks demonstrate that naturalistic explanations fall short. Their work invites further exploration into the origins of creativity, noting that the genius of the human mind requires an external, intelligent source beyond the material world.

GROK on Hitler's persecution of JEHOVAH'S Witnesses.

The Nazi persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses was a brutal and systematic campaign rooted in the regime’s ideological opposition to the group’s religious convictions and refusal to conform to Nazi authority. Jehovah’s Witnesses, known for their strict adherence to biblical principles, rejected Nazi ideology, refused to swear allegiance to Hitler, perform military service, or participate in Nazi rituals like the Hitler salute. This defiance made them a target, as the Nazis viewed their non-conformity as a direct challenge to their totalitarian control.

From 1933, when the Nazis seized power, Jehovah’s Witnesses faced escalating persecution. Their literature was banned, meetings were raided, and thousands were arrested. By 1934, the Gestapo intensified efforts, seizing property and sending members to concentration camps. In the camps, such as Dachau, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück, they were marked with a purple triangle, a symbol distinguishing them from other prisoners. Estimates suggest around 10,000 Witnesses were imprisoned, with 2,500 to 5,000 dying due to execution, torture, or harsh conditions. Unlike other groups, Witnesses could often secure release by signing a declaration renouncing their faith, but most refused, viewing it as a betrayal of their beliefs.

them from families to be raised in Nazi-aligned households or institutions. Despite this, Witnesses maintained clandestine networks, distributing literature and holding secret meetings, often at great risk. Their resilience stemmed from their apocalyptic worldview, seeing persecution as a test of faith and a sign of the end times.

Post-war, their suffering was less acknowledged than that of other groups, partly because their persecution was driven by religious rather than ethnic or political factors. However, their stand against Nazism remains a striking example of resistance through non-violent conviction. 

On Darwinism's aspirations to hard science status

 Physics Envy Is Not Helping Evolutionary Biology

David Coppedge

One of Murphy’s Laws of Technology facetiously avows, “Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables the organism will do as it darn well pleases.” Can such a law be tested with an ammeter or a differential equation?

“Physics envy,” a term sometimes used to disparage the “soft sciences,” expresses the desire of biologists to share the scientific prestige of physics which has been highly esteemed since Newton for its mathematical precision. Launch a cannonball, calculate the force on a dam, or fly a spacecraft, and if the initial conditions and variables can be measured accurately, physicists can usually predict the outcomes meticulously. The laws of physics, expressible with differential equations and tensor calculus, can even predict new laws. But can evolutionary biologists predict the size and time of emergence of a small predator in an ecosystem overpopulated by mice? Hypothesizing “methinks it is like a weasel” is uncomfortably vague.

Organisms Obey Physics, But…

To be sure, the bodies of organisms will obey the laws of physics. When launching a human cannonball, physicists can predict where to place the net. The power output of an electric eel can be measured with voltmeters. The luminosity of fireflies submits to photometry. Terms such as entropy and enthalpy can also be used to model processes of photosynthesis in plants.1

That’s not the kind of physics that evolutionary biologists envy. They want to predict what evolution will do, or post-dict what it has done. Sometimes they try too hard to imitate physicists in their stories by borrowing their terms. One recent paper,2 for instance, attempted to describe “The emergence of eukaryotes as an evolutionary algorithmic phase transition.” They’ve compared a saltational evolutionary change, in effect, to water going from liquid to steam.

During the first phase of this process, corresponding to prokaryotes, protein length follows gene growth. At the onset of the eukaryotic cell, however, mean protein length stabilizes around 500 amino acids.

Supposedly this is when the water starts exhibiting convection before boiling.

While genes continued growing at the same rate as before, this growth primarily involved noncoding sequences that complemented proteins in regulating gene activity. Our analysis indicates that this shift at the origin of the eukaryotic cell was due to an algorithmic phase transition equivalent to that of certain search algorithms triggered by the constraints in finding increasingly larger proteins.

In physics, phase transitions are reversible. Steam can condense into liquid water again. The authors of this paper want to present a major step up the ladder of evolutionary progress.

Perhaps their “phase transition” language can be forgiven for its pictorial value. They never explain, though, how the prokaryotes broke through this phase to emerge with new organelles, a nucleus, and new molecular machines like the spliceosome. With the magic word “emergence,” they simply allege that it happened.

The emergence of the eukaryotic cell, most likely arising from the symbiosis between two previously unrelated organisms — an archaeon host cell and a bacterium that would become mitochondria — brought a new cellular structure with membrane-bound nucleus and organelles. Without this evolutionary event, the posterior evolution of multicellular organisms represented by animals, land plants, and the majority of fungi would not have been possible.

Feel the tension (another physics term measurable with instruments). The authors struggle to make their model look like a physics paper. They even derive the tension with equations.

Our blend of theoretical and empirical approaches will ultimately uncover how the tension between a conserved process of gene growth and the constraints on the increasingly longer proteins resolved in a phase transition signaling the emergence of the eukaryotic cell.

Later they are even more explicit that their model belongs in the physics category, even like astrophysics. But in drawing this comparison, they point out an embarrassing gap.

Our portrait of a phase transition is in agreement with the lack of intermediate forms behind the emergence of eukaryotes — what has been termed a black hole at the heart of biology. Previous work has also highlighted the shift between prokaryotes and eukaryotes on the basis of energetic constraints, or metabolic allocation. Our results add an algorithmic dimension to this view emphasizing the role of constraints. It reconciles the contingency of evolution — exemplified by the random exploration of the search space — and the universality of physics.

Evolution, they hope, has reached the pinnacle of physics. Time to self-congratulate!

Importantly, our framework has an unparalleled predictive power, as shown by its ability to predict not only the specific laws governing the growth of genes and proteins across the entire evolutionary history, but also the precise moment in time at which eukaryotes emerged and the critical mean gene length at which this occurred.

Unsurprisingly, the press release from Gutenberg University celebrates the achievement of its homeboys. “The study recently published in PNAS not only answers essential questions, but is interdisciplinary, combining computational biology, evolutionary biology, and physics.” Great. Now use the equation to calculate the evolutionary emergence of the weasel in deep time with 6-sigma precision.

No Weasel Words Allowed

At The Conversation, Kathleen Garland and Alistair Evans from Monash University also appeal to physics for their evolutionary theory. “A secret mathematical rule has shaped the beaks of birds and other dinosaurs for 200 million years,” their article proclaims — which is a bit odd, for it is not the tradition of physicists to keep their mathematical rules secret. 

We can feel their physics envy in the essay:

Finding universal rules in biology is rare and difficult — there seem to be few instances where physical laws are so pervasive across all organisms.

But when we do find a rule, it’s a powerful way to explain the patterns we see in nature. Our team previously discovered a new rule of biology that explains the shape and growth of many pointed structures, including teeth, horns, hooves, shells and, of course, beaks.

This simple mathematical rule captures how the width of a pointed structure, like a beak, expands from the tip to the base. We call this rule the “power cascade”.

After this discovery, we were very interested in how the power cascade might explain the shape of bird and other dinosaur beaks.

Few would complain about rule-governed processes in embryonic development, where physical pressures between cells and flows of material follow laws of fluid mechanics under genetic control. They’re not talking about those. They’re talking about Darwinian evolution, as they stated in the preceding sentence: 

By studying beaks in light of this mathematical rule, we can understand how the faces of birds and other dinosaurs evolved over 200 million years. We can also find out why, in rare instances, these rules can be broken.

Their photos show the hooked beak of an eagle, the long bill of a spoonbill, the short snout of an ostrich, and the curved bill of a godwit. “All these bird beaks follow the power cascade rule of growth, despite being used for very different purposes,” they boast. Their physics-like model explains all — except when it doesn’t. “While rare, a few birds we studied were rule-breakers.” The Eurasian spoonbill (pictured at the top) evolves as it darn well pleases. “Perhaps its unique feeding style led to it breaking this common rule,” they sigh, as they return to Just-So Storyland.

Playing Games

A look through another paper in PNAS is sure to satisfy physicists with its equations and matrices.3 Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) with its apparent mathematical precision comes close to mollifying physics envy. Unfortunately, these authors come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

We argue that it is crucial for the field of evolutionary game theory to emphatically acknowledge that the replicator dynamics is more limiting than previously acknowledged (or fully appreciated) in terms of the biological systems that its predictions can apply to. Here, we have discussed a fundamental limitation of the replicator dynamics, the implications of which had not been reconsidered or explicitly acknowledged as a substantial caveat, even as the field moved to address other limitations, e.g., that the replicator dynamics ignores stochastic effects, that it muddles growth rates and interactions, or that it apparently ignores more realistic genetics and demography. This fundamental assumption — that the game is the only source of fitness differences — is so likely to be broadly violated across natural systems, that the potential for paradoxical findings and unproductive debates is very high.

Stochastic effects ensure that the organism will do as it darn well pleases. 

A week later in Current Biology,4 John Harte discussed another biological field where failure is always an option. He summarized an ecological model that demonstrated only partial success:

A theory-derived ecological equation of state relating biodiversity, productivity, abundance and biomass in ecosystems has been tested with satellite-derived proxy forestry data. Predicted failure of the relationship in disturbed ecosystems is partially supported but further ground-based analysis is needed.

Biology Is Not Physics

Biology, with all of its subdisciplines, is an ancient science worthy of esteem for the wealth of insights it brings. But it’s not physics. Biology is largely observational and taxonomic, and its explanations tend to be statistical (i.e., messy). Like Garland and Evans admitted, rare are the instances where identifiable causes yield predictable effects in law-like regularity. 

Irregularity is due to the nature of the beast. Animal algorithms predict behaviors en masse but there will always be exceptions. Evolutionary biologists invest great hope in the exceptions, the mutations, the innovations, that they believe “nature” will “select” to drive a population to new fitness peaks (but see this). Much as they would like to wrap the magic word “emergence” in equations, the nature of biology balks at being reduced to physics. I asked Paul Nelson about this. He replied:

I don’t think the problem in biology, however, is physics envy, as much as it is reality denial, or, more charitably, trying to use the wrong analytical / explanatory tools for the phenomena at hand. Imagine Caravaggio trying to paint this eye … with house paint rollers, or spray paint. Ain’t happening. “Physics envy” is really the belief that “equations will suffice,” when the data — a single protein, for instance — simply cannot be expressed as any mathematical relation. Amino acid sequences (and their nucleotide templates) are highly incompressible. If you want a histone or a kinase, you need the complete sequence, and math will not contain enough detail to specify that sequence…. If a scientist denies reality by trying to use the wrong tools for the data at hand, he will produce nonsense.

The incompressibility in biology is a feature, not a drawback. It’s what makes our world beautiful with wildflowers, towering redwoods, majestic whales, and individual human faces. When it comes to explaining origins, evolutionary biologists seek to alleviate physics envy in vain. They’ll find more relief, I believe, in teleology. On that, see the new book by David Klinghoffer about the thought of ID biologist Richard Sternberg, Plato's Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome.

GROK on aristotle's take on body and soul.

 Key Points:

Matter: The physical "stuff" or potentiality of an object (e.g., wood for a table).

Form: The actualizing principle that makes an object what it is (e.g., the shape and function of a table). For living things, the form is the soul (psyche), which organizes and animates the body.

Unity: Matter and form are not distinct substances but two aspects of a single substance. A living being, like a human, is a unified whole, not a soul trapped in a body.

Soul and Body: In humans, the soul (form) is the principle of life, movement, and thought, inseparable from the body (matter). The soul isn't a separate entity that survives death in Aristotle's view, unlike Plato’s dualism.

Causality: Form relates to Aristotle's four causes, especially the formal cause (what a thing is) and final cause (its purpose or function).

Real life tony stark is a game changer?

 

GROK on the western schism.

Yes, there were times when multiple popes presided simultaneously, primarily during the Western Schism (1378–1417). During this period, rival factions within the Catholic Church elected different popes, leading to competing claims to the papacy:

Western Schism (1378–1417): After the death of Pope Gregory XI, the election of Pope Urban VI in Rome was contested. A group of cardinals, dissatisfied with Urban VI, elected Clement VII, who set up a rival papacy in Avignon, France. This created two lines of popes: one in Rome and one in Avignon. At its peak, there were three claimants to the papacy:

Rome: Urban VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII.

Avignon: Clement VII and Benedict XIII.

Pisa (1409–1415): A council in Pisa attempted to resolve the schism by electing Alexander V (and later John XXIII), creating a third line of popes.The schism was resolved at the Council of Constance (1414–1418), which deposed the rival popes and elected Martin V as the sole pope.

Another earlier instance was the Great Schism of 1130–1138, when two popes, Innocent II and Anacletus II, claimed the papacy after a disputed election. Innocent II eventually prevailed.

These periods of multiple popes were driven by political, regional, and ecclesiastical disputes, leading to competing claims rather than a unified papacy.Another earlier instance was the Great Schism of 1130–1138, when two popes, Innocent II and Anacletus II, claimed the papacy after a disputed election. Innocent II eventually prevailed.

These periods of multiple popes were driven by political, regional, and ecclesiastical disputes, leading to competing claims rather than a unified papacy.Another earlier instance was the Great Schism of 1130–1138, when two popes, Innocent II and Anacletus II, claimed the papacy after a disputed election. Innocent II eventually prevailed.

These periods of multiple popes were driven by political, regional, and ecclesiastical disputes, leading to competing claims rather than a unified papacy.

GROK'S pregame analysis of a hypothetical Sherlock Holmes vs. Lex Luthor chess match up

 A chess match between Sherlock Holmes and Lex Luthor would be a fascinating clash of intellects, each bringing unique strengths to the board. Here’s a breakdown of how it might go:

Sherlock Holmes:

Strengths: Holmes, as depicted by Arthur Conan Doyle, is a master of observation, deduction, and strategic thinking. His ability to read opponents and anticipate moves would make him a formidable chess player. He’d likely excel at recognizing patterns and exploiting subtle mistakes, treating the game like a puzzle to unravel.

Approach: Holmes would play methodically, focusing on positional play and long-term strategy. He’d analyze Luthor’s body language and habits (e.g., hesitations or nervous tics) to predict his moves. His improvisational brilliance, seen in cases like A Study in Scarlet, suggests he could adapt to unexpected tactics.Weakness: Holmes might overthink or become distracted by trying to “solve” Luthor’s psychology, potentially missing simpler, direct threats. His reliance on logic could also make him vulnerable to unorthodox or chaotic moves.

Weakness: Holmes might overthink or become distracted by trying to “solve” Luthor’s psychology, potentially missing simpler, direct threats. His reliance on logic could also make him vulnerable to unorthodox or chaotic moves.

Lex Luthor:

Strengths: Luthor, as a DC Comics supervillain, is a genius strategist with a knack for outmaneuvering even Superman. His intellect is paired with ruthless pragmatism, making him a dangerous chess opponent. He’d likely prepare extensively, studying Holmes’ known games (if any) and devising traps tailored to his opponent’s style.

Approach: Luthor would play aggressively, favoring sharp, tactical lines to pressure Holmes early. He might employ psychological warfare, taunting Holmes to disrupt his focus, as seen in his manipulations in stories like All-Star Superman. His access to advanced technology (e.g., AI simulations) could give him an edge in preparation.Weakness: Luthor’s arrogance could lead to overconfidence, causing him to underestimate Holmes’ unconventional brilliance. His need to dominate might push him into risky positions, especially if Holmes baits him into overextending.

The Match:

Opening: Luthor might choose a sharp opening like the Sicilian Defense to test Holmes’ tactical acumen, while Holmes could opt for a solid, flexible setup like the London System to keep options open and observe Luthor’s tendencies.

Middlegame: Holmes would likely focus on subtle positional advantages, slowly building pressure while dodging Luthor’s tactical traps. Luthor, meanwhile, would push for complications, aiming to overwhelm Holmes with aggressive piece play.

Endgame: If the game reaches an endgame, Holmes’ precision and patience could give him an edge, especially in a simplified position where calculation trumps bravado. However, Luthor’s cunning might shine in a chaotic endgame with imbalanced material.Outcome:

Edge to Holmes: Holmes’ ability to read people and adapt on the fly might frustrate Luthor, whose plans often rely on opponents following predictable patterns. Holmes’ experience solving complex mysteries suggests he could outmaneuver Luthor in a battle of wits, especially if Luthor’s ego leads to a critical misstep.

But Luthor’s no slouch: If Luthor anticipates Holmes’ deductive approach, he could use misdirection—perhaps sacrificing material to create a position too complex for even Holmes to untangle in time.Outcome:

Edge to Holmes: Holmes’ ability to read people and adapt on the fly might frustrate Luthor, whose plans often rely on opponents following predictable patterns. Holmes’ experience solving complex mysteries suggests he could outmaneuver Luthor in a battle of wits, especially if Luthor’s ego leads to a critical misstep.

But Luthor’s no slouch: If Luthor anticipates Holmes’ deductive approach, he could use misdirection—perhaps sacrificing material to create a position too complex for even Holmes to untangle in time.Verdict: In a single game, I’d lean toward Holmes winning 55-45, thanks to his superior intuition and adaptability. In a longer match, Luthor’s preparation and stamina could close the gap, but Holmes’ ability to learn his opponent’s style would likely keep him ahead. It’d be a tense, brilliant battle, with both players pulling out every trick.

If you want a deeper analysis of specific chess strategies they might use or a fictional play-by-play of a game, let me know!Verdict: In a single game, I’d lean toward Holmes winning 55-45, thanks to his superior intuition and adaptability. In a longer match, Luthor’s preparation and stamina could close the gap, but Holmes’ ability to learn his opponent’s style would likely keep him ahead. It’d be a tense, brilliant battle, with both players pulling out every trick.

If you want a deeper analysis of specific chess strategies they might use or a fictional play-by-play of a game, let me know!

Real life tony stark says we are definitely in the jetson's timeline