Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 147

October 30, 2021

Aquinas and Intelligent Design

For reasons beyond my comprehension, there is a significantly large (or at least loud) group of Thomists (followers of Thomas Aquinas) who reject Intelligent Design, allegedly on Thomistic grounds. I recently came across an old paper that addresses most of the criticisms of ID raised by Thomists that I have heard. Anyway, I had thought of writing a similar paper, but, voila, someone else already did it!

St. Thomas Aquinas on Intelligent Design

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Published on October 30, 2021 21:43

“Twisted” human birth canal “evolved” to be good design

It’s a bipedalism thing:

The relatively narrow human birth canal presumably evolved as a ‘compromise’ between its abilities for parturition, support of the inner organs, and upright walking. But not only the size of the birth canal, also its complex, ‘twisted’ shape is an evolutionary puzzle. Researchers now present new insights into why the human birth canal evolved to have this complex shape. They suggest that the longitudinally oval shape of the lower birth canal is beneficial for the stability of the pelvic floor muscles …

Traditionally, it has been assumed that the transverse dimension of the human pelvis is constrained by the efficiency of upright locomotion. “We argue that the transverse elongation of the pelvic inlet has evolved because of the limits on the front-to-back diameter in humans imposed by balancing upright posture, rather than by the efficiency of the bipedal locomotion,” says Philipp Mitteroecker, who was also involved in this study. A longitudinally deeper inlet would require greater pelvic tilt and lumbar lordosis, which would compromise spine health and the stability of upright posture. These different requirements of the pelvic inlet and outlet likely have led to the evolution of a twisted birth canal, requiring human babies to rotate during birth.

University of Vienna, “Why do humans possess a twisted birth canal?” at ScienceDaily

Should somebody tell Nathan Lents?

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: Does Nathan Lents, Author Of A “Bad Design” Book Really Teach Biology? A Doctor Looks At His Claims About The Human Sinuses

More on bipedality/bipedalism: Paleontologist: Humans walked on two legs from the beginning Carol Ward: It seems to be a behavior that was present in some of the earliest members of our branch of the family tree. It represented what was really the initial major adaptive change from any apelike creature that came before us.

Researchers: Supernova prompted humans to walk upright Funny, if bipedalism originated in a global catastrophe, that it never occurred to any other primate to resolve the problem by becoming fully bipedal. But keep thinking. Resist groupthink.

Bipedalsm: Regulatory area cent.com/intelligent-design/bipedalis...” target=”another”>missing in humans

Researcher: To Understand Human Bipedalism, Stop Assuming “A Chimpanzee Starting Point”

Rough terrain caused humans to start walking upright

Early bipedalism walked no straight line

We’ve also heard that bipedalism developed so we could hit each other. Or carry infants. Or scarce resources. Or save energy. Or cool down. But mainly so we could have our hands free for whatever. (Saving eneregy and cooling down don’t really count here because lots of other methods would have worked; they just wouldn’t have freed the hands at the same time.)

See also “I’m Walkin’, Yes Indeed I’m Walkin’” But Not Because It’s Necessarily a Better Way to Get Around

Also, Design perspectives and the physiology of walking

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Published on October 30, 2021 20:05

At Mind Matters News: Physicist: If humans died out, the galaxy might lose all meaning

Ahead of a big climate change conference, Brian Cox assesses the prospect of other habitable planets or their civilizations much more soberly than we often hear:

Ahead of the big climate change conference COP 26 (31 Oct – 12 Nov 2021), physicist and broadcaster Brian Cox offers an ominous warning which also raises some questions. Speaking in connection with his new series Universe, he presents a starkly different picture from much that we hear:

News, “Physicist: If humans died out, the galaxy might lose all meaning” at Mind Matters News

Humans might be the only intelligent beings in our galaxy, so destroying our civilisation could be a galactic disaster, Prof Brian Cox has warned leaders in the run-up to Cop26.

Speaking at the launch of his new BBC Two series Universe, the physicist and presenter said that having spoken to the scientists around the world advising the show, he thought that humans and sentient life on Earth “might be a remarkable, naturally occurring phenomenon” and that was something that “world leaders might need to know”.

Tara Conlan, “Earth’s demise could rid galaxy of meaning, warns Brian Cox ahead of Cop26” at The Guardian (October 19, 2021)

Indeed? The messages we hear more frequently are more like this: There could be 300 million or 6 billion habitable planets in our galaxy and more than 30 intelligent civilizations.

In any event, if all intelligent beings were wiped out of our galaxy, for whom, exactly, would it be a disaster (apart from ourselves)?

Cox ends up supporting the Privileged Planet Hypothesis (Earth is special):

“The more I learn about biology … the more astonished I am we exist at all”, adding that while astronomers said there were about 20bn Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, “so we might expect life to be everywhere”, “almost every biologist I speak to says, ‘Yes, but all it will be is slime at best.’ We live in a violent universe and the idea you can have planets which are stable enough to have an unbroken chain of life might be quite restrictive.”

Tara Conlan, “Earth’s demise could rid galaxy of meaning, warns Brian Cox ahead of Cop26” at The Guardian (October 19, 2021)

The opposite view, that Earth is a pale blue dot, a mediocre planet (the Copernican Principle) was championed by Carl Sagan (1934–1996), among others. While Sagan was concerned about environment issues, he strongly believed that there were other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy and that contacting them was an imminent possibility. Anything like the uniqueness of Earth would be a limiting factor.

Takehome: Brian Cox, host of The Universe, ended up becoming “more religious than I intended” when he reflected on why we care about the stars.

You may also wish to read: The UFOs Carl Sagan was convinced of but couldn’t talk about. Sagan had already been denied tenure at Harvard, a sci-fi screenwriter reflects, and he couldn’t afford to take more chances. Writer Bryce Zabel recalls a dispute with Sagan on the topic in a parking lot 40 years ago, during the Voyager 2 flyby — which changed Zabel’s career.

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Published on October 30, 2021 19:33

A Review of Steve Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis

Terry Scambray has given Uncommon Descent permission to reprint his review of Steve Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis — originally published at New Oxford Review — at Uncommon Descent. So here it is:

The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries Revealing The Mind Behind The Universe, Stephen C. Meyer. Harper One, 2021. 448 pp.

Fred Hoyle, the astrophysicist, coined the phrase, “big bang,” to ridicule the idea that the universe had a beginning, a position which suited him as an atheist, materialist. But he changed his mind when the evidence indicated that the universe did have a beginning and that it was as finely tuned as a concert piano though with millions more interdependent variables that make possible our, Just right, Goldilocks universe. As Hoyle wrote, “the properties of the universe fall within narrow and improbable ranges that are absolutely necessary for any complex life forms to exist.”

In The Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer presents a variety of other scientists who may not have agreed with Hoyle but in one way or another contribute to Meyer’s thesis that science points to the existence of the Judeo-Christian God.

Meyer summarizes his thesis early on when he points to three 20th century mutually supporting scientific discoveries that provide strong evidence for belief in the God of Judaism and Christianity. The first is the aforementioned Big Bang which brought the material world into existence with an opening day of stupendous fecundity. Though a seemingly chaotic event, the Big Bang nonetheless gave birth to our Goldilocks universe all of whose elements have been dished out in astonishingly providential proportions. Meyer’s final evidence for his thesis is the fact that “since the beginning large amounts of new functional genetic information have arisen to make new forms of life possible.” An example of this is “the Cambrian Explosion,” sometimes called “biology’s Big Bang” wherein new body plans, phyla, appear within a relatively short geological time period.

In bringing scientific findings to bear on theology and vice versa, Meyer shows that he operates in a long tradition because science developed uniquely from the Judeo-Christian worldview. He admits that this fact first puzzled him since the classical Greek thinkers are thought to be the foundation of the Western intellectual tradition. And, indeed, they did believe that nature had an underlying order, “an intrinsic self-existent logical principle called the

Nonetheless, just as a picture can be painted in different ways and a building can be constructed likewise, so too God created the world His way, making it the duty of science to find out exactly how He did it. Thus, science developed as both logical and contingent, which is to say that it strives for internal consistency and empirical validation.

Steve Meyer

Meyer fills all this in with an explanation of the Hebrew contribution to the development of science citing the lesser known historian, Edgar Zilsel. He continues with an enlightening section on the depth of Christian belief of many of the earliest scientists especially Isaac Newton whose theological writings are invariably presented as an eccentric avocation, distinct from his rigorous science. Not so, says Meyer; for Newton’s theology and science are merely another reflection of the indispensable unity between Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and science on the other.

Of course, this unity is largely unknown when it is not openly resisted by the great unwashed in our educational citadels and in the editorial offices of influential journals, whose bastions defend a materialist cult which they call “science.” The story of this resistance and Meyer’s response to it is taken up in the ensuing 400 pages of his exhaustively superlative book.

Many know that the most famous modern scientist, Albert Einstein, found the proposition that the universe had a beginning repugnant. He, like others including Aristotle, thought that the universe had always existed in “a steady state.” In the words of Carl Sagan, “The cosmos was all there ever was and ever will be.” But observations, evidence, contradicted the equations, the mathematical formulae that Einstein had relied on for his certitude.

First a Russian physicist, Alexander Friedmann, solved Einstein’s gravitational equations by allowing for the possibility of a dynamic universe while simultaneously relying on Einstein’s theory of gravitation which stipulated that massive bodies cause space to curve or contract. Though Friedman did not refute Einstein, he did show the need for an “implausible degree of fine tuning” in order to maintain the tension between the drag of gravity and the pull of expansion, akin to the centripetal force that pulls us in as we round a curve and the opposing centrifugal force that pushes us out.

This tension was resolved by a Belgian priest and physicist, Georges Lemaitre, who agreed with Friedman. Then Lemaitre ventured further into metaphoric space by relying on observations showing light from distant galaxies as well as data from Edwin Hubble’s telescope both of which showed the distances to other galaxies. Taken together these findings demonstrated that galaxies are speeding away from one another. And while Friedmann had shown that the universe could change, Lemaitre showed that it had changed by arguing that galaxies were not merely speeding away into preexisting space but that space itself was expanding.

“Not so fast!” Einstein, in effect, said of Lemaitre‘s idea which Einstein contemptuously dismissed by saying it was, “inspired by the Christian dogma of creation, and totally unjustified from the physical point of view.”

Moving from this opening part of his book, Meyer next explains “abduction” as his method of drawing inferences from these scientific findings. For example, Charles Lyell, “the father of modern geology,” used abduction when he observed the present and then extrapolated backwards in time in order to discover what happened in the distant past. Thus, Lyell posited, “The present is the key to the past,” meaning that present geological forces working relentlessly in the deep past carved up the earth’s surface to its present state.

Meyer qualifies this process by saying that it must also recognize multiple causes in the past, including evidence for the trinity of “singularities” upon which he bases his argument. Abduction also fails to offer the air tight assurance of a logically deductive argument. Instead, Meyer writes, “abductive reasoning represents an inference to the best explanation.”

Meyer concludes his treatise by mixing it up with formidable materialist opponents like Stephen Hawking. Hawking argued that since gravity at the subatomic level might have worked differently during the earliest stages of the universe, it could be the source of the origin of the universe; however, in making his mathematical calculations about the early universe, he needed to introduce the concept of “imaginary time.” But this way of eliminating the need for a temporal beginning of the universe “did not correspond to anything in the real physical universe,” Meyer emphatically writes, echoing the objection of other physicists and philosophers. Besides as Hawking admitted, “imaginary time” was merely an expedient to support his claim.

Meyer takes on other materialist theories like the “Wheeler-DeWitt equation” and “The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis” which seek to explain away the uniqueness of our universe. He concludes with the 19 th century physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann’s postmodernist, many worlds’ cosmology in which “Boltzmann Brains” could self-assemble as the result of chance arrangements of atoms due to random quantum fluctuations. Accordingly such fluctuations at the subatomic level may cause bizarre outcomes like the Statue of Liberty waving at passers-by and, though such events may not happen in our universe, given enough universes and time, such things will happen and happen endlessly!

But, as Meyer points out, each of these rationales involves monumental question begging; that is, each assumes the prior existence of features of our universe like gravity, matter, time, reliable mathematics and so on which themselves demand explanations.

In Meyer’s first book, Signature in the Cell, he showed that the bio-chemical instructions in each DNA molecule resemble the language of computer code, the only known source of such specified information being a mind. His second also widely praised book, Darwin’s Doubt, revealed that the fossil record relentlessly demonstrates that the body plans, the architecture, of all the major animals arose relatively dramatically in direct contradiction to Darwin’s theory that such body plans developed in tiny, incremental steps.

With The Return of the God Hypothesis, Meyer has once again written a hefty book in size and subject. Nonetheless, it is a pleasure to read because of the way that his inviting voice brings light to bear on complicated and profoundly influential subjects. And while a short review cannot do justice to most books, this limitation applies five-fold to this abundantly rich book. Indeed, with this book, Meyer completes a compelling trilogy which refutes the prevailing materialism of the intelligentsia while also completing his one long argument that, in the words of Solomon, “from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.”

Terry Scambray writes from the Great Central Valley of California

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Published on October 30, 2021 19:08

At Mind Matters News: Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: Colonizing Mars is a ridiculous idea!

Making Mars habitable (terraforming) has been kicking around engineering circles for decades. What are the chances, given Moore’s Law-level increases in technology? Sabine Hossenfelder points out that the Mars’ biggest habitability problem is lack of a magnetic field and no plausible technology solution is in sight:

The biggest problem is not that Mars is “minus 60 degrees Celsius or minus 80 Fahrenheit,” she explains, but that it has no magnetic field so the atmosphere was blown away by the solar winds. So to form Mars into a second Earth, we would first need to give it a magnetic field. How easy is that?

News, “Theoretical physicist: Colonizing Mars is a ridiculous idea!” at Mind Matters News

In a paper that was just published in April in the International Journal of Astrobiology, two physicists explain that all you have to do put a superconducting wire around Mars, simple enough, isn’t it? The circle would have to have a radius of about 3400 kilometers but the diameter of the collected wires only needs to be about five centimeters. Well, okay, you need an insulation and a refrigeration system to keep it superconducting. And you need a power station to generate a current. But other than that, no fancy technology required.

That superconducting wire would have a weight of about one million tons which is only about 100 times the total weight of the Eiffel tower. The researchers propose to make it of bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide (BSCCO). Where do you get so much bismuth from? Asteroid Mining. Piece of cake.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Terraforming Mars in 3 Simple Steps” at BackRe(Action) (October 16, 2021)

Takehome: The difficulties inherent in the idea of terraforming Mars are a good argument for the Privileged Planet Hypothesis regarding Earth. Earth is indeed special:

You may also wish to read: Theoretical physicist shows why the sim universe is pseudoscience It’s a lot of fun in science fiction and some scitech celebs buy in. But Sabine Hossenfelder would find plenty to disagree with Avi Loeb about. One problem is, computers can’t simulate human thought because it is often non-computational, which means it is something computers can’t do, by definition.

and

Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder asks, was the universe made for us? She says no. But the question is more complicated than it appears at first. It is true that we have only one universe to go by but then each of us is a unique individual too. What if you had an experience no one else has had? Does that make it untrue?

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Published on October 30, 2021 18:25

October 29, 2021

Reshuffling of early human names results in new name, Homo bodoensis

Artist rendering of Homo bodoensis. Credit: Ettore Mazza.

The name is given to fossil finds from half a million years ago. Along the way we learn about genuine difficulties in classification:

The Middle Pleistocene (now renamed Chibanian and dated to 774,000-129,000 years ago) is important because it saw the rise of our own species (Homo sapiens) in Africa, our closest relatives, and the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Europe.

However, human evolution during this age is poorly understood, a problem which paleoanthropologists call “the muddle in the middle.” The announcement of Homo bodoensis hopes to bring some clarity to this puzzling, but important chapter in human evolution.

The new name is based on a reassessment of existing fossils from Africa and Eurasia from this time period. Traditionally, these fossils have been variably assigned to either Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis, both of which carried multiple, often contradictory definitions.

“Talking about human evolution during this time period became impossible due to the lack of proper terminology that acknowledges human geographic variation” according to Roksandic, lead author on the study.

Recently, DNA evidence has shown that some fossils in Europe called H. heidelbergensis were actually early Neanderthals, making the name redundant. For the same reason, the name needs to be abandoned when describing fossil humans from east Asia according to co-author, Xiu-Jie Wu (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China).

Further muddling the narrative, African fossils dated to this period have been called at times both H. heidelbergensis and H. rhodesiensis. H. rhodesiensis is poorly defined and the name has never been widely accepted. This is partly due to its association with Cecil Rhodes and the horrendous crimes carried out during colonial rule in Africa — an unacceptable honour in light of the important work being done toward decolonizing science.

The name “bodoensis” derives from a skull found in Bodo D’ar, Ethiopia, and the new species is understood to be a direct human ancestor. Under the new classification, H. bodoensis will describe most Middle Pleistocene humans from Africa and some from Southeast Europe, while many from the latter continent will be reclassified as Neanderthals

University of Winnipeg, “New species of human ancestor named: Homo bodoensis” at ScienceDaily (October 28, 2021)

So it’s not really a new find but an attempt to tidy up a messy classification system. Let’s see if the new name sticks.

The paper is open access.

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Published on October 29, 2021 19:40

An interesting take on how science splutters out amid cries of “Trust the Science!”

COVID-19 was practically a laboratory experiment for that:

You would expect a person with a “scientific” mindset to look for information, and to share it… But the new fan of “science” doesn’t trust the public with information, and so far as he can, when information doesn’t fit his goals, he buries it. When he says “trust the science,” he means “trust the scientists” — a group of people whose research he many times can’t see, hasn’t read, and can’t explain, whose funders he doesn’t know, and whose political and social goals he hasn’t been told. It’s gotten so bad that OSHA, the branch of our government tasked with keeping workers safe, is no longer requiring businesses to report adverse reactions to the vaccine — for the reason that (I quote) “OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination.” I don’t know which scientists to trust, but I know whom to not trust, and that is the person who refuses information and hides it.

A scientific mindset should be a machine and a method. It should mean that you know what facts you know and what you don’t know, that you’re open to new facts and factoring them in, and that the most important thing isn’t feeling right, but heading in the right direction. What being “pro-science” actually means today is that you have the “right” facts. Not that you’re good at sifting, but that you’re good at accepting — and that you have the “correct” scientists as authorities.

Jeremy Egerer, “The End of Science” at American Thinker (October 29, 2021)

Curiously, “Trust the Science” echoes across the landscape at about the same time as Cancel Culture has started going after prominent historical scientists. There may be a connection in the sense that the slogan relates to a state of mind in which Correct scientists are identified and given implicit obedience — for now — and Incorrect ones are destroyed.

You may also wish to read: At The Times of London: “Charles Darwin will be next if his great defender is toppled” Huh? What? If Huxley (or Darwin) is cancelled, “the practice of science itself no longer matters.” Well, that’s true but for Cancel Culture, that’s a feature, not a bug. It shows their immense power, generally in the robes of victimhood. Have none of these Darwinians been paying attention to the war on math and the war on science?

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Published on October 29, 2021 19:15

At Mind Matters News: Is online learning poised to replace universities?

Perhaps sooner than we think, if present trends continue. This seems relevant to the rampages of Cancel Culture: A degree may confer only social status — which depends on others’ acceptance:

Billions of dollars in endowments, generous government funding, and enormous social cachet all combine to make universities very powerful. But are they indispensable?

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who will be speaking at COSM 2021 on November 10, doesn’t seem to think so…

There is a lot to mull here but, essentially, [Allen] Farrington argues, riffing Thiel, that the current purpose of the university is to provide, at huge cost, a piece of paper that supposedly gains the graduate admission to the upper crust of society: “Higher education has become a transfer of wealth from the future earnings of the aspirational lower and middle classes to a metastasising administrative parasite, which funds the permanence of the cultural elite by wielding its leverage over anybody foolish enough to dissent.” He thinks the disease is “terminal.”

But what to do? Here Farrington turns to Peter Thiel again…

Farrington offers two additional ideas: He encourages businesses to fund more research directly (“It is not a mystery that some of the greatest scientific work of the twentieth century was funded by AT&T at Bell Labs, and Xerox at Xerox PARC. There were no administrators forcing them to write twenty-page reports explaining why Unix would advance social justice.”)

Second, he suggests, businesses could quit rewarding expensive pieces of paper…

News, “Is online learning poised to replace universities?” at Mind Matters News (October 29, 2021)

Businesses are already less inclined to reward expensive pieces of paper than in the recent past.

Would the decline of U’s in favor of online learning be better or worse for ID?

Takehome: Venture capitalist Peter Thiel doubts that a degree is a good investment today — he has called college administrators subprime mortgage brokers. Learn why.

A relevant film:

You may also wish to read: At The Times of London: “Charles Darwin will be next if his great defender is toppled”
Huh? What? If Huxley (or Darwin) is cancelled, “the practice of science itself no longer matters.” Well, that’s true but for Cancel Culture, that’s a feature, not a bug. It shows their immense power, generally in the robes of victimhood. Has none of these people been paying attention to the war on math and the war on science?

and

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Published on October 29, 2021 18:39

At The Times of London: “Charles Darwin will be next if his great defender is toppled”

[image error]Thomas Henry Huxley

Worried by the Cancellation of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) and other 19th century Darwinism greats, journalist Oliver Kamm writes:

The passage of 150 years has not dimmed Huxley’s achievements. He was a great figure of scientific inquiry, and a famed defender and populariser of Charles Darwin’s discoveries. Yet not everyone approves. A report by an independent history group at Imperial College London recommends that the university remove Huxley’s bust and rename a building that bears his name.

Oliver Kamm, “Charles Darwin will be next if his great defender is toppled” at The Times (October 28, 2021)

The rest of the column is behind a wall but Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has reprinted it. Here’s a relevant snippet:

Removing Huxley’s name in censure pre-empts the question of what weight to accord his contribution to knowledge. It should be immense. And as the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has pointed out, if Huxley is treated this way then the “cancellation” of Darwin (who was likewise an abolitionist who made racist comments) may not be far behind.

Coyne suggests that before we do any such thing with a historical figure, we ask whether their commemoration is due to the good they did, and whether this outweighed the bad. In Huxley’s case the answers have to be yes or the practice of science itself no longer matters.

via

Jerry Coyne, “Morning column opposing Huxley’s cancellation” at Why Evolution Is True (October 29, 2021)

Huh? What? If Huxley (or Darwin) is cancelled, “the practice of science itself no longer matters.” Well, that’s true but for Cancel Culture, that’s a feature, not a bug. It shows their immense power, generally in the robes of victimhood. Has none of these people been paying attention to the war on math and the war on science?

One outcome of having been beneficiaries of Cancel Culture for so long is that, when it is turned on their icons, they don’t understand and don’t see it coming. And, so far at least, they don’t appear to have a good opposition strategy.

Some of us think that universities, as such, are toast and that science will soon need to be conducted apart from them. See: Is online learning poised to replace universities?

You may also wish to read: You may also wish to read: It begins at last… T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, about to be Cancelled – other early Darwinists to get the chop soon, we hear. W. D. Hamilton, Ronald Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane are also threatened. We never thought it would happen but it is happening… so fast.

and

Bad timing or just plain tone deaf? Reuters puffs “modern-day Darwin” E. O. Wilson. Look, Reuters, if you really think the guy has a message worth hearing, quit calling him “the Darwin of the 21st century.” Unless, of course… naw, that’d be a conspiracy theory…

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Published on October 29, 2021 18:04

October 28, 2021

Bad timing or just plain tone deaf? Reuters puffs “modern-day Darwin” E. O. Wilson

No really. Right in the middle of “T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, about to be Cancelled,” — with the question hanging: Can Darwinism really survive Cancel Culture when all Darwin’s messengers are Unpersons? — Reuters sees fit to run with this:

Edward O. Wilson, a 92-year old naturalist hailed as the Darwin of the 21st century, said humankind is not too polarized to save the planet, even as some of the world’s biggest polluters drag their feet on cutting carbon emissions and arresting global warming.

He sees preventing catastrophic climate change — the aim of U.N. climate talks starting in Scotland on Sunday — and saving biodiversity, or the variety of plant and animal species in the world, as two initiatives that must happen together.

Tim McLaughlin and Kanupriya Kapoor, “Harvard’s modern-day Darwin warns against humanity’s downward slope” at Reuters

Look, Reuters, if you really think the guy has a message worth hearing, quit calling him “the Darwin of the 21st century.” Unless, of course… naw, that’d be a conspiracy theory…

You may also wish to read: It begins at last… T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, about to be Cancelled – other early Darwinists to get the chop soon, we hear. W. D. Hamilton, Ronald Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane are also threatened. We never thought it would happen but it is happening… so fast.

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Published on October 28, 2021 19:33

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