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Topic: John A. Davison: An Evolutionary Manifesto: A New Hypothesis For Organic Change
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nosivad
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posted 04. June 2010 06:59
252. John A. Davison - May 29, 2010 [Edit]
Three Persistent Myths In The History Of Science
by John A. Davison
In presenting this brief essay I am going to use the technique that was employed by the Southern preacher who was asked to what he owed the success of his sermons. He responded with “First, I tell ‘em what I’m gonna tell ‘em, then I tell ‘em, then I tell ‘em what I done told ‘em.”
I also suspect that very few will accept my conclusions which will be nothing new for me. I add at the outset that little of what I present is original with me. What may be original is my willingness to stake my reputation as a scientist on what I am about to present.
Not only am I going to identify three persistent myths, but I intend to prove that they are myths. I realize that is a tall order and I am delighted to undertake the challenge that such a task involves.
I will present these proofs in the inverse order of their longevity with the most persistent and oldest myth first and the most recent myth last.
So here they are as employed by the successful preacher.
Man has free will.
Darwinism was the mechanism for organic evolution. Note my deliberate use of the past tense.
Oil is a fossil fuel.
Before I proceed further, let me prime the pump of undeniable Truth with a few advance warnings.
“It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it to be true."
Bertrand Russell
“An hypothesis does not cease to be an hypothesis when a lot of people believe it.”
Boris Ephrussi
“…the easiest person to fool is yourself.”
Richard P. Feynman
“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
Albert Einstein
I love Einstein’s metaphor of the “waves of laughter” doing the shipwrecking. Oh if only it were that simple!
First, man most certainly does not have Free Will and never did have. If that were true there would be no war or conflict of any kind because everyone would intellectually realize that it is a crime to kill a fellow human being. I am sure that assertian will raise certain hackles so I will not bother with such trivia and get right to the formal proof that Free Will is myth.
The proof comes from the findings of investigators who were not in the least interested in the question of Free Will. They were interested in the question of Nature versus Nurture in influencing human behavior. They took advantage of a natural experiment provided by pairs of homozygotic (identical) twins which had been separated at birth or very early in life and put up for adoption. By finding these long separated twins and reuniting them later in life, the investigators discovered that every character they learned about by observation and interview showed some shared hereditary components. As expressed by one of the primary investigators, Thomas Bouchard, a psychologist at he University of Minnesota -
“Bouchard would later insist that while he and his colleagues had fully expected to find traits with a high degree of heritability, they also expected to find traits that had no genetic component. He was certain, he says, that they would find some traits that proved to be purely environmental. They were astonished when they did not. While the degree of heritability varied widely – from the low thirties to to the high seventies – Every trait they measured showed at least some degree of genetic influence. Many showed a lot.”
William Wright, Born That Way, page 40, (1998)
What makes this study so significant is that the results were not anticipated by the investigators. The history of science is rife with the significance of the unexpected result. Friedrich Wohler (1800-1882) did not expect to be able to synthesize urea, a compound that until then had been thought to be strictly the product of living activity. Furthermore, that is not what he was trying to do. That unexpected result heralded the birth of what we now call organic chemistry. The unexpected result found by the Bouchard group serves to explain why this study has been to a large extent neglected. Since the twins’ world views, whether atheist or devout, conservative or liberal, etc, you name it, are to large extent shared predetermined characters, it is not surprising that this most significant study has been largely ignored. The average human being is convinced of his own mindset and not in the least interested in considering that he might not have been objective in reaching that position. Such a fundamental feature of the human psyche is bound to have far reaching affects, affects not necessarily for the good of society as will become evident.
Certain individuals exhibit the extremes to which an innate ideology can distort their perspective beyond the range of what can be considered normal behavior. There are many who accept the Bible verbatim from cover to cover. At the other extreme are those like Clinton Richard Dawkins and Paul Zachary Myers who spend enomous amounts of energy denigrating all faith based institutions and the individuals associated with them. Dawkins’ recent suggestion that Pope Bendeict XVI should be arrested the moment he sets foot on British soil can hardly be regarded as a reasoned reaction to the Holy Father’s planned visit. Furthermore, such behavior may inflame like minded souls to potentially criminal acts of violence. Such ravings should be exposed as dangerous. I am baffled by the extent that a fine mind can descend to such depths. It cannot be the result of reason alone. I am reminded again of Einstein’s steadfast determinism –
“It is abhorrent to me when a fine intelligence is paired with an unsavory character.”
There is a recent interesting manifestation of the role of a predestined mindset presented in the book “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Poltical Madness” by Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr, M.D., (2006). Rossiter, a forensic psychologist treats the liberal mindset strictly in environmental terms, making no mention of the work of Bouchard and his colleagues or of William Wright’s book. I cannot imagine a more dramatic proof that we are blinded by our genetic predispositions. Rossiter is absolutely convinced of his thesis which is why he neglects to consider an alternative explanation.
It should surprise no one that I must agree with Einstein’s life long determinism -
EVERYTHING is determined…by forces over which we have no control.”
My emphasis in caps.
Einstein’s determinism has now been experimentally verified by the carefully controlled studies on identical twins. Verification is the sine qua non for every scientific advance, the same criterion that subsequently verified his 1905 hypothesis of relativity. If Free Will can be abandoned as I insist it must, it will greatly facilitate the understanding of why the next two myths must be abandoned as well.
My next myth to be destroyed is Darwin’s Victorian fantasy that Natural Selection of randomly generated genetic variations provides the mechanism for evolutionary change. I will not spend much time on this one because I have already dispensed with the Darwinian model with my essay “What’s Wrong With Darwinism? Suffice it to say that the same acid test of experimental verification that disposed of Free Will has also disposed of Darwinism countless times, most notably by a Darwinian selectionist himself, Theodosius Dobzhansky. Dobzhansky set out to transform, by artificial selection, the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster into a new member of the same Genus. In other words Dobzhansky tested the Darwinian proposal in the experimental laboratory. He failed, admitted he failed, yet remained a convinced Darwinian selectionist nevertheless, as near as I can tell, for the rest of his life. What is curious about Dobzhansky is that he was a student of Leo S. Berg before Dobzhansky left for the New World. Berg, who dismissed Darwinism must have been very disappointed to see his student adopt Darwinism when he arrived at Columbia University where he fell under the influence of Thomas Hunt Morgan and the other geneticists who had fervently adopted Mendelism (1900) as the mechanism for the realization of Darwin’s Natural Selection. Fortunately for Berg, he was long dead when Dobzhansky wrote the following in the Foreword to the 1968 edition of the English translation of Berg’s “Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law.”
“A majority of evolutionists, including the author of this Preface, consider L.S. Berg’s theory of nomogenesis erroneous.”
Oh the power of majority opinion! Dobzhansky’s history illustrates the validity of Einstein’s insight into the nature of the human condition -
“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinons which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
Albert Einstein. Ideas and Opinions, page 28.
Theodosius Dobzhansky, a brilliant scientist, will always be a mystery in the annals of experimental biology because he failed the ultimate test of every scientist’s integrity which is to follow the trail of the truth wherever that may take him. I am convinced that if Dobzhansky had remained in Russia with his mentor, Leo Berg, that Darwinism wuld have disappeared long ago as a credible explanation for organic change. Dobzhansky simply responded to the “social environment” in which he found himself when when he arrived in the New World, a social environment to which the notion of a purposeful evolution was anathema and largely remains so to this very day.
The last myth to be exposed is the notion that oil is a fossil fuel. Oil, a generic term, can be produced by living organisms. Olive oil, castor oil, cod liver oil etc are all products of the metabolism of living organisms and so it was only natural that subterranean oil was also assumed to be the product of once living creatures, for some bizarre reason in the popular culture – dinosaurs. So entrenched is this notion that Sinclair Oil Company continues to use the green dinosaur, affectionately known as “dino,” as its logo!
What happens when an animal dies? Its remains are rapidly converted to CO2 and H2O by bacteria on the surface. More likely, the animal will be consumed by other animals thereby conserving the biomass. Either way everything ends up as part of the surface metabolism of the planet. The same can be said for much of plant life. We now know that oil exists deep in the earth far below any levels that could possibly ever have been associated with surface life. Russian investigators in particular questioned the biogenic origin of oil suggesting that hydrocarbons were a natural constituent of the earth’s interior in no way related to surface life. Thomas Gold (1920-2004) championed the abiogenic theory here in America and was instrumental in the disposing of the myth that oil is a fossil fuel. While all the evidence against biogenesis of oil is beyond the scope of this essay, I am convinced with Thomas Gold that both oil and hard coal are products of processes that never had anything to do with living things. Furthermore, experiments by Gold and others have verified that hydrocarbons can be generated from non organic sources under the conditions that must prevail deep in the earth. I join with others by offering the following challenge. Demonstrate in the experimental laboratory how reptile flesh can be converted into crude oil.
Once again we see the persistence of a transparent myth in the face of incontrovertible, scientifically derived evidence to the contrary.
Fossil fuel, Darwinian evolution and Free Will are all myths and all for exactly the same reason. They have all failed the acid test of experimental verification. Galileo, the father of experimental science, pointed the way with -
“Facts which at first seem improbable will, on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.”
The three myths that I selected, and God knows there are plenty more, all met their fate in exactly the same way. They succumbed to the instrument that Galileo invented – the experimental laboratory.
And so I end this brief essay, confident that my thesis will be ignored as most human beings will continue to follow the dictates of their congenital predispositions to believe what they want to believe, what they have always believed, what they always will believe, helpless victims of their destinies to fulfill their role in a cosmic Plan drawn up millions of years ago, a Plan now in its final stages of completion. I am not the first to capitalize the word plan.
“I believe there is a Plan, and though in the slow course of evolution there have been ups and downs, and what look like mistakes, the plan has gone on; and we may feel sure that it cannot fail to reach its goal.”
Robert Broom, Finding The Missing Link, page 101.
Untested belief is the mortal enemy of Truth and Knowledge and has no place in science.
Recommended further reading.
“The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels” by Thomas Gold.
I transmitted this essay to, among others, Pee Zee Myers, Richard Dawkins and would have to Wesley Elsberry but he has blocked my email.
[ 02. October 2010, 14:53: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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posted 22. July 2010 18:34
I thought this from my weblog might be of some interest to those interested in global warming, and the influence of man on his environment.
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277. John A. Davison - July 22, 2010 [Edit]
I am looking forward to the first full blown Gulf of Mexico hurricane because I believe it will go a long way toward cleaning up the oil spill. The smaller the globules of oil, the greater the total surface that a given volume of oil presents to the oil-eating bacteria. This follows from elementary dimensional analysis since Surface (L squared) divided by Volume (L cubed) reduces to 1/L. The greater the surface, the greater the rate of degradation. This holds for UV degradation as well. Thus a 1 meter diameter sphere of oil would take 1000 times longer to degrade than the same volume dispersed as 1 millimeter spheres. The rate of degradation of 1 micron spheres would proceed 1 million times faster. Let us hope for a rip snorting hurricane season so the Gulf of Mexico can rapidly return to its pristine state. I believe we will be pleasantly rewarded. Mother Nature, while she can be devastating, can also be a good housekeeper.
Just remember where you heard it first!
It doesn’t get any better than this.
I love it so!
[ 22. July 2010, 18:36: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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posted 17. December 2010 04:11
From my weblog
452. John A. Davison - December 17, 2010 [Edit]
http://www.prweb.com/releases/prwebtheory/genome/prweb4896744.htm
This is exciting news and should sound the death knell to Darwinian mysticism. It also is in complete accord with the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis, the Universal Genome Hypothesis, the evolutionary proposals of William Bateson, Reginald C. Punnett, Leo Berg, Richard B. Goldscmidt, Robert Broom and Otto Schindewolf, not a religious or atheist fanatic in the lot.
“Darwinians of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your Natural Selection.”
(after Karl Marx)
My thanks to Terry Trainor for the alert to this very important new development.
For a further elaboration visit my website -
jadavison.wordpress.com
Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year to all.
[ 17. December 2010, 04:17: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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posted 18. January 2011 03:13
I am disappointed at the absence of reviews of my book "Unpublished Evolution Papers of John A. Davison." If any appear please alert me.
jadavison.wordpress.com
[ 15. August 2011, 01:53: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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posted 25. March 2011 08:29
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/unpublished-evolution-papers-of-john-a-davison/13029949?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/1
The above link will take you to Lulu publishers and the opportunity to buy my book. There you will also find four reviews which to my knowledge are the only published reviews presently available. I hope this book will serve as an effective antidote to the atheist inspired Darwinian model which still dominates evolutionary science. Apparently the Darwinians are content to continue pretending that they have never had credible critics. Nothing could be further from the truth as I hope I have established with my hitherto unpublished essays on the great mystery of organic evolution. I continue writing essays which can be found on the "new essays" button at the top of my home page -
jadavison.wordpress.com
I look forward to including them in a second edition of my book.
If anyone hears of any other reviews, please call my attention to them - nosivadaj@msn.com
[ 25. March 2011, 12:41: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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posted 14. August 2011 11:15
The following is from my website. I present it here to remind others that I am still extant and still dedicated to the proposition that neither atheist Darwinism nor religious fundamentalism have any place in the scientific process.
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284. John A. Davison - August 14, 2011 [Edit]
On August 12 and 13 this blog had 8 visitors each day, fully vindicating what I predicted in the Afterword of my book. I, as with all my sources before me, continue to be ignored by the ruling, Darwinian, atheist inspired establishment and the Christian Fundamentalists as well. These factions are so dedicated to the destruction of one another, that it has never occurred to either that neither has ever had a leg to stand on.
That remains our thesis and always will. There has never been a place for personal religion in any aspect of the scientific process nor has there ever been a place for the professed atheist.
Only fools would deliberately hinder themselves with such absurd premises. Yet that is exactly what has happened over the course of the last century and a half.
Twenty-seven years ago in 1984 I published an alternative to the Darwinian paradigm in the Journal of Theoretical Biology at that time a highly respected journal genuinely interested in such questions as the mechanism by which organic evolution took place. That is no longer true and hasn’t been since 1985 when the Journal acquired a new Editor who was a devout Darwinian. With his ascension, any serious challenge to the Darwinian myth became impossible and that remains so to this very day.
I will in the near future fully document this unfortunate turn of events, identifying the participants by name. The only reason I am not doing it now is because I await verification from the University of Vermont Library research staff of certain key dates and Editorial changes.
I am sure my many readers are aware by now that I fully document every thing I present here, always have and always will, so you will just have to wait for the details. But I can assure all concerned that it will be well worth waiting for.
In the meantime, I am content to be treated with contempt by the likes of Paul Zachary Myers, Wesley Royce Elsberry, Mark Chu-Carroll, Bob O’Hara and a handful of others stupid enough to engage in such tactics.
Gregor Mendel was also ignored and even treated with a degree of contempt by Karl Nageli, then the Tsar of European Botany. Just as Mendel created the science of Genetics, so we replaced the Darwinian hoax with a real hypothesis compatible with everything we now know from the fossil record and the experimental laboratory. Mendel’s great achievement was ignored for 34 years (1866-1900). Ours has only been ignored for 27 years. Mendel died long before his work was recognized and we expect the same.
We are proud to receive the same treatment as a great scientist of the past, a humble Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel.
As for our many adversaries, James Lovelock, in his book “The Vanishing Face of Gaia,” reminded us that -
“The eminence of a scientist is measured by the length of time he holds up progress.”
page 199
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P.S. This message emailed to the “Big 4 of Darwinian mysticism,” Paul Zachary Myers, Wesley Royce Elsberry, Clinton Richard Dawkins and Laurence A. “larry” Moran.
I also reproduced it on “brainstorms” forum on the following link -
http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-6-t-000370-p-111.html
one of the very few venues where I am still allowed
[ 15. August 2011, 01:59: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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posted 28. August 2011 17:45
Below from my weblog is my latest essay.
Natural Selection: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism.
The words “Darwinism” and “Natural Selection” have come to be virtually synonymous. I will show in this essay that Natural Selection (NS) not only had nothing to do with evolutionary change, but served to prevent change for as long as possible, its role today as always in the past. How such a fundamental misunderstanding ever managed to take place requires an explanation which is the purpose of this essay.
After Darwin returned from the nearly five years he had been naturalist on board the H.M.S. Beagle, he settled in 1842 in what was to become his home for the rest of his life. Down House (note the absence of the terminal e) is located in the village of Downe in the London Borough of Bromley near the southern border of greater London. Darwin never left England again and it was there at Down House that he developed his notion of Natural Selection as the engine for organic change. His home is now a museum and tourist attraction where devoted disciples visit to pay homage to the man who more than anyone else removed God from the evolutionary equation. So taken is Laurence A. “larry” Moran with Darwinism that he named his blog “Sand Walk” after the path that Darwin frequented as he reviewed his evolutionary fantasies.
A Creator (or creators) were no longer necessary as evolution could now be explained as an auto-catalytic process fueled only by the accumulation of small changes selected for or against by Nature, the sole judge of what will or will not survive to produce the changes that we know have taken place over the millennia in which species have come and gone in the history of life on this planet.
For 17 years Darwin pondered what he had observed on the voyage of the research vessel H.M.S. Beagle and it was there in and around Down House that the notion of NS finally fully crystallized; yet he still hesitated to publish his explanation. An interesting question arises. Why did he wait so long? Of course we can only speculate but it is generally agreed that what prompted publication was the fact that Alfred Russel Wallace had reached a similar if not exact explanation for organic change – Natural Selection.
Scientists live in mortal fear of being “scooped” and when such a prospect looms, they tend to react promptly. Wallace had sent his ideas in the form of a letter to the Linnaean society and so it was arranged that his letter and Darwin’s would be read simultaneously as part of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society. The letters which had already been received were each read in a meeting of the Society which took place on July 1, 1858.
Darwin reacted quickly, assembling his materials in the form of what he described as an “Abstract” and his book was published on November 24th, 1859 under the imposing title -
“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”
That title leaves little to the imagination as Darwin has clearly stated that NS is the cause of organic evolution.
Having summarized its history, we are now prepared to demonstrate that there is not a word of truth in Darwin’s book and that the sole role of NS has been misunderstood from 1859 to the present day.
Before we begin, it is important to review the role Alfred Russel Wallace played in this unfolding drama. While Darwin spent the rest of his life in England, Wallace was becoming the greatest and most widely traveled naturalist of the 19th century. Wallace soon modified his earlier position at first gradually and finally completely as exhibited by the title of his last book -
“The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose.”
London, Chapman and Hall, Limited, 1911.
Wallace died in 1913 in his 90th year. It is no wonder that the Darwinians ignore the metamorphosis of the co-author of natural selection, the sine qua non of the Darwinian paradigm.
A scientific hypothesis is only as good as it can be verified by experiment or direct observation. The theoretical physicist Richard P. Feynman reminded us that -
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
Sensu strictu, Natural Selection has never reached the status of theory as theories are verified hypotheses, a level NS has never attained. The gradual changes required by the Darwinian thesis has never been observed nor has it ever been verified by controlled experiment.
The key word is gradual. Gradual changes require long periods of time to be observable and this has been the argument the Darwinians use to support the NS concept. Related to this is their insistence that evolution is still going on. Everything the Darwinian sees is through the lens of a continuing evolutionary process of adjustment to a changing environment. There is no question that such changes can occur. For example, insects can become resistant to insecticides, microbes to antibiotics and many organisms can become tolerant to changes of temperatures and toxic conditions, etc, etc. But do these adaptations represent evolutionary changes? As far as can be determined, they do not because when the challenging factor is removed, the organisms return to their prior state. The key element that distinguishes evolution from adaptation is the irreversibility of organic evolution. Any change which can be reversed is not an evolutionary change. No mammal has ever evolved into a reptile, no reptile into an amphibian and no amphibian into a fish yet we know with certainty that sequence in reverse is the path through which evolution has actually taken place.
The paleontologist Otto Schindewolf was adamant about the notion of an experimental or reproducible evolution.
“Many authors have spoken of experimental evolution; There is no such thing. Evolution, a unique, historical course of events that took place in the past, is not repeatable experimentally and cannot be investigated in that way.”
Basic Questions in Paleontology, page 311. (Schindewolf’s italics).
As an experimental scientist, I was at first shocked at Schindewolf’s position but have since come to believe that it best represents the historical facts. The reaction by the Darwinians has been, aside from rarely mentioning Schindewolf at all, to dismiss his evolutionary conclusions as “spectacularly flawed.” Those are the words Stephen Jay Gould used when he wrote the Foreword to Schindewolf’s 1993 English translation – “Basic Questions in Paleontology,” (page xi) – originally published in German in 1950 as “Grundfragen der Palaontologie.” Forty three years after its publication and 22 years after Schindewolf’s death, Stephen Jay Gould decided to dismiss Schindewolf’s evolutionary science by describing it as “spectacularly flawed.” I have never forgiven Gould for this shabby treatment of the greatest paleontologist since Cuvier. We can be certain that Gould would never have dared use those words when Schindewolf was still alive.
It is characteristic of the Darwinians to ignore their critics while alive and then to dismiss them once they can no longer respond by claiming that we know much more now than we did then. Those many critics of the Darwinian model constitute a veritable honor roll of the most distinguished biologists of the post Darwinian era – William Bateson, Reginald C. Punnett, Leo S. Berg, Robert Broom, Pierre Grasse, Richard B. Goldschmidt and many others, not one a religious or atheist zealot. Nothing has changed since St. George Mivart in his 1873 book – “On the Genesis of Species” – described NS as “incompetent” because it cannot explain the appearance of new structures – “THE INCOMPETENCY OF ‘NATURAL SELECTION’ TO ACCOUNT FOR THE INCIPIENT STAGES OF USEFUL STRUCTURES.” – The title of MIvart’s Chapter 2, page 35. Chapter 1 was the Introduction.
While many had questioned NS, it was not until 1922 that it was finally described for what it actually has always been and still always does.
In his remarkable book “Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law,” Leo Berg properly identified the role of NS as follows -
“The struggle for existence and natural selection are not progressive agencies, but being, on the contrary, conservative, maintain the standard.”
page 406.
While many others had questioned NS before him, Berg unambiguously and vigorously stated what, in his opinion, NS actually does, a position which I believe best represents the testimony both of the fossil record and what we see operating with the present biota. With his carefully crafted sentence, Leo Berg struck a death blow to Darwinism by turning the role of Natural Selection upside down, rendering it useless as an explanatory thesis and at the same time explaining its primary role which has always been the same – to delay evolutionary progress for as long as possible, a strategy which, with very few exceptions, has terminated with extinction.
But has Berg’s revolutionary thesis been recognized by the Darwinians? The answer is an unqualified NO! Stephen Jay Gould in his ponderous “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory” made no mention of Leo Berg in the text and didn’t list Nomogenesis in his Bibliography. Ernst Mayr whose office was down the hall from Gould’s (at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology) also made no mention of Berg in the text of his “The Growth of Biological Thought,” but added insult to injury by listing “Nomogenesis” in his Bibliography. Thus Mayr openly dismissed Berg’s science as of no consequence. Accordingly, the two most prominent spokespersons for the Darwinian paradigm revealed themselves to be scientific bigots, unfit to wear the mantle of scientist by allowing their congenital atheism to destroy the one feature that has always characterized the true scientist, the willingness to abandon a failed hypothesis when that becomes necessary. Rather than confront their many critics, the Darwinians continue a tradition that began a century and a half ago. when they failed to respond to St. George Mivart’s accurate description of NS as “incompetent.”
Leo Berg was the greatest Russian biologist of his generation and, in my opinion, the most insightful evolutionist of all time. His book “Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law” remains a treasure trove of evolutionary science unexcelled as a source of real evolutionary science free of the trappings of ideology, prejudice and bigotry. Everything we have learned in the eighty-nine years since its publication fully vindicates the words with which Berg described the closely related mysteries of ontogeny and phylogeny -
“Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance.”
Nomogenesis, page 134
“It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it to be true.”
Bertrand Russell
By accepting Berg’s position, the Linnaean taxonomic system receives powerful support. Linnaean taxonomy depends heavily on the apparent immutability of species, a feature which allows even the amateur to correctly identify any organism he is likely to encounter. Taxonomic keys proceed on the basis of alternate choices which lead in relatively few steps to the unambiguous identification of the organism sought. The vast majority of organisms in their natural state exhibit very little variation, and those that do are easily identified as to species as, for example, white tigers. Furthermore, the genetic basis for such rare mutants obviously has little if any adaptive advantage in any event. The lowly chickadee, so common in the Northeast provides an ideal example. Every chickadee not only looks rather exactly like every other chicadee, but they all sound alike as well – chickadee-dee-dee, chickadee-dee-dee. Apparently only the chickadees recognize the opposite sex! These observations are in perfect accord with Berg’s insistence that natural selection and the struggle for existence “maintain the standard.”
Indeed, from what we know with certainty, there is little reason to assume that even speciation is still in progress. I have repeatedly challenged the Darwinians to present an example of a new verified species and the species known to be its immediate ancestor. Such examples have not been forthcoming, leading me to postulate, with Robert Broom and Julian Huxley, that creative organic evolution is no longer in progress. What we see are the products of a past evolution, not examples of evolution in progress as the Darwinian model demands. One of the most remarkable contradictions in the evolution literature is the way that the Darwinian faithful have ignored a conclusion drawn by one of their own, Julian Huxley, the man who coined the term “modern synthesis” which became the title of his book “Evolution: The Modern Synthesis,” otherwise a thoroughly Darwinian interpretation of evolutionary phenomena.
Oblivious to the science of their critics, both those within and without the Darwinian camp, the faithful continue their allegiance to the fundamentals as laid out by their founder – Charles Robert Darwin. I can only conclude that we have witnessed and continue to witness the conquest of a blind, atheist inspired ideology over reason on a scale hitherto unknown in experimental and descriptive science.
Based on what we have presented here we are now prepared to offer our interpretation of the findings from the experimental laboratory and the fossil record as follows -
1. Chance and natural selection have played no role in the ascending sequence which the fossil record so clearly represents.
2. The sole role of natural selection has been limited to small reversible transformations none of which lead to new species. However, the accumulation of deleterious genes may play a role in extinction.
3. No evolutionary changes have ever been gradual which is how it is possible to identify every organism, living or fossil, with certainty using simple binary keys.
4. There is every reason to believe that creative organic evolution is a phenomenon of the distant past and is no longer taking place. Thus, it follows that the current biota is a terminus, a climax of what must have been a planned sequence in which chance has played at best a trivial role.
5. Both phylogenesis (evolution) and extinction have been planned. Without a planned extinction, evolution could never have taken place.
That is our position and so it will remain until it is demonstrated to be without merit, an eventuality I do not anticipate.
“Science commits suicide when she adopts a creed.”
Thomas Henry Huxley
P.S. italicized words have been lost in this transfer but may be retrieved by going to the original on my weblog -
jadavison.wordpress.com (the predictions thread).
[ 28. August 2011, 17:53: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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posted 29. August 2011 00:32
I thank Micah Sparacio who has always allowed me to present my science here at "brainstorms" forum.
[ 30. August 2011, 03:36: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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posted 12. September 2011 01:59
The above essay challenges the very root of Darwin's thesis, yet it has evoked no response from those interested in the mechanism of organic evolution. It is pathetic to witness such apathy here at "brainstorms" of all places. That has been the fate of every critic of the Darwinian thesis from its inception in 1859 to the present day. I can only conclude that Darwin's Victorian musings are still etched in stone, immune to question, the law of the scientific landscape.
It is a sad day in the history of science when such a vulnerable notion as Natural Selection can no longer even be discussed in an open forum. I am disappointed but not surprised.
"To insist, even with Olympian assurance, that life appeared quite by chance and evolved in this fashion, is an unfounded assumption which I believe to be wrong and not in accordance with the facts."
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, page 107
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nosivad
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posted 17. September 2011 18:35
What I find most curious is the fact that aside from one interruption by Chritopher Bening, one by William Brookfield and a couple by DaveScot, one to call me an "asshole," I have been virtually the only contributor to "brainstorms" for the last year and a half. It seems that "brainstorms" has become the counterpart to Wesley Elsberry's "Davison's Soap Box" over at Panda's Thumb. During that interval I have posted here several challenging essays all without any response whatsoever. In short, I have been isolated and ignored. Is this treatment deliberate is the question I now ask, and if so, for what purpose, and who is behind it? Is our science anathema here as it is elsewhere? So it seems to this investigator. A response to this question will be greatly appreciated. If no response is forthcoming, I see no reason to continue leaving messages here since they can be found on my website - jadavison.wordpress.com
My use of the collective "we" is deliberate because I am largely the spokesperson for some of the most important critics of the Darwinian model over the 151 years it has managed to somehow survive. So it is not just Davison that is being ignored and isolated but every one of his sources as well. This is nothing new in the history of evolutionary science but is characteristic of that history from Mivart in 1871 right up to the present.
The only thing that distinguishes "brainstorms" from Panda's Thumb, EvC, After The Bar Closes, Pharyngula, Uncommon Descent and RichardDawkins.net is that I am still allowed to hold forth here.
Another website has also allowed me to post messages without respnding. That is Larry Moran's Sandwalk, named after the path frequented by Charles Darwin at Down House, his estate near London. At Sandwalk I left six unanswered challenges on Larry Moran's Birthday thread. Later when I tried to visit it I found he had deleted the thread from his May 2011 Archives. When I publicly exposed his actions, Moran reinstituted the thread. It now stands as I left it, still with no response. I have documented this sordid business in detail on my weblog.
I am concerned when our science is ignored not only by the Darwinista but also by those who believe as I do that the animate world was designed. Not only is our science unacceptable on the vast majority of internet forums, but my book "Unpublished Evolution Papers of John A. Davison" (Lulu publishers) has sold only five copies (that I can verify).
I realize that my comments may seem like paranoid ramblings, but I can assure you they are not. Our reception continues in the same style it has always received from opposed camps dominated on the one hand by Christian fundamentalists and on the other by equally devout Darwinian atheists. It has always been our position that neither faction has any place in the scientific process and not one of my sources was a fanatic of either a religious or atheist persuasion.
"Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and is springs from the same source... They are creatures who can't hear the music of the spheres."
Alice Calaprice, The New Quotable Einstein, page 201
If I can't evoke any responses here, there is little reason to continue here. I am forced then to conclude that this forum, as so many others, is not friendly to our science; and like the others, is unable or unwilling to explain why.
[ 24. September 2011, 03:53: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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nosivad
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posted 09. November 2011 03:32
The following message from my weblog:
298. John A. Davison - November 8, 2011 [Edit]
I just sent the following email to Stuart Campbell, Pee Zee Myers, Wesley Elsberry, Larry Moran and Richard Dawkins -
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Stuart Campbell and the other recipients of this message.
With respect to my use of Leo rather than Lev Berg, why don’t you obtain a copy of Nomogenesis and see who the author is? I’ll bet Nomogenesis isn’t in the Cornell Library or, if it is, I’ll bet it still looks brand new. Be sure to read what Berg’s protégé Theodosius Dobzhansky had to say about his ex mentor’s science after Berg had long been dead. (1969 edition by M.I.T. Press).
Furthermore, Dobzhansky failed the acid test faced by every scientist. He refused to believe his own experimental findings after he had proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Drosophila melanogaster could not be experimentally transformed through selection into a new species.
Nomogenesis, Leo Berg’s only book dealing with the mechanism of organic evolution, is far and away the most important book ever published on that subject because he properly identified the role of natural selection. Natural selection has always been anti-evolutionary and so, we believe, has obligatory sexual (Mendelian) reproduction. It is natural selection today that has finally brought evolution to a complete standstill because creative evolution is no longer in progress. Only extinction remains.
If you or any of the “Big 4″ have the capacity to respond in civil fashion to this message, I will present your responses on my weblog.
John A. Davison, Professor of Biology Emeritus, University of Vermont. L4 Grandview Drive, South Burlington, VT 05403
webpage jadavison.wordpress.com
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I will give them a couple of days to take this opportunity to counter our thesis. Failure to respond will indicate the death of the Darwinian myth.
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nosivad
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posted 15. November 2011 07:58
From my weblog:
518. John A. Davison - November 15, 2011 [Edit]
Peter Borger has reprinted my essay – “Natural Selection: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism” on the link -
http://www.facebook.com/groups/286873574672591/316939271666021/
It is in two parts.
I hope others will respond there in civil fashion, somethimg which has yet to happen here.
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jadavison.wordpress.com
the "here" to which I refer is my weblog, not brainstorms.
[ 15. November 2011, 08:00: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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