Letters by a modern St. Ferdinand III about cults

Science should never be the domain of closed-off 'experts', who chase money, fame, tenure or relevancy. Pasteur famously conducted public displays and experiments to go around the establishment, who mocked him, debauched his work, demeaned his person, naming him as a non-scientist [he was a trained chemist]. Open systems exist in IT, why not science ?

From Douglas Axe's excellent book on why Evolution is just such a-scientific jargon and nonsense:

'Embracing open science empowers people who will never earn Ph.D.s to become full participants in the scientific debates that matter to them. Instead of merely following expert debates, non experts should expect important issues that touch their lives to be framed in terms of common science. Once they are, everyone becomes qualified to enter the debate. This doesn’t apply to intrinsically technical subjects, of course, but the matters of deepest importance to how we live are never intrinsically technical.'

Common sense trumps degrees. I don't recall the Wright Brothers, or William Harvey having advanced degrees. In today's clime they would be ridiculed as rubes and rednecks. These men amongst thousands of others, have had more impact on humanity than the millions of advanced degrees spouting metaphysics in lieu of real science, or realistic invention. Open science means show us the data, show us the methodology, prove your 'conclusions' and don't hide behind fraudulent and corrupt 'crony' review, poorly named as 'peer' appraisal.

In this regard, Axe asks the cult of a Darwin a very simple question. Can your turn enzyme A into enzyme B? Surely if mud became His Majesty Husain Obama, enzymes must have, and must be able to; self-create ?

'Our aim [Axe was part of a scientific team looking at changing enzyme formation], was to determine whether it would be possible for enzyme A to evolve the function of enzyme B within a time frame of billions of years. If natural selection really coaxed sponges into becoming orcas in less time, inventing many new proteins along the way, we figured it should have ample power for this small transformation. But after carefully testing the mutations most likely to cause this functional change, we concluded it probably isn’t feasible by Darwinian evolution. Additional work supports this conclusion. Mariclair Reeves—like Ann Gauger, a biologist at Biologic Institute—painstakingly tested millions upon millions of random mutations, searching for any evolutionary possibility that we may have overlooked in our first study. She found none.'

So where is the bio-chemical proof that mud became Orcas ? These metaphysicians can't even get 2 enzymes to change their functional pattern. Yet we are to believe that the human brain 'evolved' by luck into the most complex organ in the universe. How did it happen precisely ?

'The staggering complexity of the brain’s structure, with its hundred trillion neural connections, is certainly one reason for the slow progress, but I have to think that false preconceptions are another. Materialism, in particular, has constrained thinking within brain science as severely as it has elsewhere. Even the title of that workshop—From Molecules to Minds—is a proclamation of the view that mental processes are grounded in molecular processes.'

Random molecules bouncing around do not self-arrange to create the brain. 'Natural Selection' is just rhetoric. Genes selecting from what, how and why? Competitive advantage ? What would gene software know about competitive advantage ? Why would a sponge want to become a fish ?

'Tour says: If one asks the molecularly uninformed how nature devises reactions with such high purity, the answer is often, “Nature selects for that.” But what does that mean to a synthetic chemist? What does selection mean? To select, it must still rid itself of all the material that it did not select. And from where did all the needed starting material come? And how does it know what to select when the utility is not assessed until many steps later? The details are stupefying and the petty comments demonstrate the sophomoric understanding of the untrained..'

Evolutions always quote natural selection. This seems particularly stupid. Why would a fish 'select' to 'evolve' legs, and change its software, when it does not know what a leg is ? Why would a chaotic process impinge itself on the fish, and force it into 'evolving' genetic software for legs ? It is ridiculous and tautological. Not one single experiment has proven that fish 'evolve' to become amphibians, reptiles or anything else other than fish. It is all or nothing. Everything in a fish must work together in a complex whole. If you start ripping components apart the whole will simply die. This is what mutations do in the real world. They kill information. Our ignorance of genetics and DNA software is no excuse to make up fairy tales.

'The view that most aspects of living things can be attributed neatly to specific genes has been known by geneticists to be false for a long time, this being the first common DNA myth to fall. A second, which has fallen only quite recently, is that scientists even have a clear understanding of what a gene is. Without exaggeration, a recent article in Science and Education stated that “the gene concept is currently in crisis.” It turns out that the simple picture of a gene as a section of DNA that encodes a protein, as described in chapter 3, no longer holds for anything but bacteria..'

The more we discovery about bio-chemistry and the complexity of life, the less Evolution makes sense – even as a fairy tale. Science like IT, should be made 'open', open to review, open to data analysis, open to computational investigation, open to criticism, open to new ideas. As it currently stands the cult of science and scientism, is one of the great obstacles to real science.