R
Rogerteder
Guest
here is an excerpt from an interview with Dr. David Berlinski. The interview took place in May 2008 in Paris France. Id be interested in your reactions.
Evolution as Tautology
CF: Well, applying logic to evolutionary theory, and particularly the mechanism that it holds forth as the explanation for everything, natural selection, where do we encounter a logical problem? Is natural selection a tautology?
DB: You know, nothing is so apt to provoke the indignation of Darwinian biologists as to remark that the centerpiece of their theory is perfectly empty because it is, in fact, a trivial truth: whatever survives, survives. And Darwinian theory does not really get beyond que sera, sera. And there are all sorts of elaborate strategies designed to circumvent that objection, but whenever they’re investigated seriously, they always return to the same point of triviality. Darwinian biologists simply have nothing much better than what survives, survives. They’ll call it differential reproduction—namely, what survives, survives. This may be just a fact of life.
It is not necessarily an annihilating point of criticism. After all, you can go back to Newton’s Principia and say force equals mass times acceleration. What is force? Well, it’s mass times acceleration…. But on the other hand, when you look at Newtonian mechanics, there is a wealth of detail, predictions that flow from the theory. The remarkable coverage it offers of phenomena is completely unlike Darwin’s theory, which really has very few predictions.
CF: Can you give some examples of why Darwinism fails as a predictive science?
DB: What has it ever told us beyond what survives, survives? We have no independent assessment in any respect—and this is a point of difference in physics—as to what qualities in a living system will establish its survivability. That is to say, we cannot look at an organism and say: “These are the qualities from a theoretical point of view, a general theoretical point of view, that we would predict would be favored under certain environments.” There is no mapping from an environment of such-and-such a nature and an organism of such-and-such a nature to a prediction about which organism is possessing which qualitative – forget about quantitative, they’re nowhere near that – will survive and which won’t. We can’t say that. All we can do is look at what happens in the evolutionary record, but that’s not scientific. We could have done that before Darwin.
CF: Or an attempt to reconstruct history?
DB: You’ve got one eel that has to travel across the Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce and another eel that doesn’t. Can we say in advance, looking at the eels, given the saltwater environment, this is what we will predict? No, we can’t, we just have to look and see. There’s nothing wrong with looking and seeing, but, you know, we don’t need a theory for that.
CF: So not only do they say whatever will be, will be, they say whatever was, was.
DB: Yes, and I have no objection to all of that.
CF: But that’s not science, that’s history—or an attempt to write history.
DB: I don’t think it makes much difference whether we say it’s science or history. It’s certainly interesting, but we haven’t reached any deep level of explanation as we have in physics…. I don’t need a school of biology to tell me that things that have survived, have survived. I know that. We’re here.
CF: Is there any aspect of the theory that is legitimately testable?
DB: No.
CF: OK.
DB: No, there’s no part of it that’s really rigorously tested.
CF: Do they even claim that there is some—
DB: — Oh sure—
CF: What’s their chief example of a testable application of the theory?
DB: You mean in terms of—
CF: —I think Miller mentioned that they had deleted a gene in the gene sequence and that within seven generations, the missing gene reappeared.
DB: Yes, the literature is full of stuff like this where something is observed, and biologists say: “Well, my goodness, by golly, that’s just what Darwin’s theory predicted.” The fact of the matter is, they never go back and show us, the rest of us, that is, how Darwin’s theory actually predicted it. That’s the crucial test. Almost anything can be brought into alignment with Darwin’s theory. That’s pretty easy. But why did human beings develop an astonishingly large brain over what is a geological blink of the eye? Well, it was advantageous. How does that follow from Darwin’s theory? I mean, what are the principles that specify large brains better, small brains, no good?
CF: And, of course, if you’re dealing with a process of mutation that’s random, how do you account for the conservation of the different mutations required for the ensemble of the new organism? How does the organism “know” what to conserve?
DB: Don’t forget, it’s not only the process of mutation that’s random. And contrary to what people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins claim, natural selection is also random…. The best that we can do is say, over geological time, that environments change randomly, because we don’t know why environments change. So you have environments that change randomly, natural selection is random, and mutations are random. So, you’ve got what statisticians would call two random variables, and the product of two random variables is again a random variable, which means the entire theory is essentially stochastic [random] in nature…. It is science with a category of chance and accident—all the structures of living systems.
CF: Which is why it can’t predict anything.
DB: Which is why it can’t predict anything.
Evolution as Tautology
CF: Well, applying logic to evolutionary theory, and particularly the mechanism that it holds forth as the explanation for everything, natural selection, where do we encounter a logical problem? Is natural selection a tautology?
DB: You know, nothing is so apt to provoke the indignation of Darwinian biologists as to remark that the centerpiece of their theory is perfectly empty because it is, in fact, a trivial truth: whatever survives, survives. And Darwinian theory does not really get beyond que sera, sera. And there are all sorts of elaborate strategies designed to circumvent that objection, but whenever they’re investigated seriously, they always return to the same point of triviality. Darwinian biologists simply have nothing much better than what survives, survives. They’ll call it differential reproduction—namely, what survives, survives. This may be just a fact of life.
It is not necessarily an annihilating point of criticism. After all, you can go back to Newton’s Principia and say force equals mass times acceleration. What is force? Well, it’s mass times acceleration…. But on the other hand, when you look at Newtonian mechanics, there is a wealth of detail, predictions that flow from the theory. The remarkable coverage it offers of phenomena is completely unlike Darwin’s theory, which really has very few predictions.
CF: Can you give some examples of why Darwinism fails as a predictive science?
DB: What has it ever told us beyond what survives, survives? We have no independent assessment in any respect—and this is a point of difference in physics—as to what qualities in a living system will establish its survivability. That is to say, we cannot look at an organism and say: “These are the qualities from a theoretical point of view, a general theoretical point of view, that we would predict would be favored under certain environments.” There is no mapping from an environment of such-and-such a nature and an organism of such-and-such a nature to a prediction about which organism is possessing which qualitative – forget about quantitative, they’re nowhere near that – will survive and which won’t. We can’t say that. All we can do is look at what happens in the evolutionary record, but that’s not scientific. We could have done that before Darwin.
CF: Or an attempt to reconstruct history?
DB: You’ve got one eel that has to travel across the Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce and another eel that doesn’t. Can we say in advance, looking at the eels, given the saltwater environment, this is what we will predict? No, we can’t, we just have to look and see. There’s nothing wrong with looking and seeing, but, you know, we don’t need a theory for that.
CF: So not only do they say whatever will be, will be, they say whatever was, was.
DB: Yes, and I have no objection to all of that.
CF: But that’s not science, that’s history—or an attempt to write history.
DB: I don’t think it makes much difference whether we say it’s science or history. It’s certainly interesting, but we haven’t reached any deep level of explanation as we have in physics…. I don’t need a school of biology to tell me that things that have survived, have survived. I know that. We’re here.
CF: Is there any aspect of the theory that is legitimately testable?
DB: No.
CF: OK.
DB: No, there’s no part of it that’s really rigorously tested.
CF: Do they even claim that there is some—
DB: — Oh sure—
CF: What’s their chief example of a testable application of the theory?
DB: You mean in terms of—
CF: —I think Miller mentioned that they had deleted a gene in the gene sequence and that within seven generations, the missing gene reappeared.
DB: Yes, the literature is full of stuff like this where something is observed, and biologists say: “Well, my goodness, by golly, that’s just what Darwin’s theory predicted.” The fact of the matter is, they never go back and show us, the rest of us, that is, how Darwin’s theory actually predicted it. That’s the crucial test. Almost anything can be brought into alignment with Darwin’s theory. That’s pretty easy. But why did human beings develop an astonishingly large brain over what is a geological blink of the eye? Well, it was advantageous. How does that follow from Darwin’s theory? I mean, what are the principles that specify large brains better, small brains, no good?
CF: And, of course, if you’re dealing with a process of mutation that’s random, how do you account for the conservation of the different mutations required for the ensemble of the new organism? How does the organism “know” what to conserve?
DB: Don’t forget, it’s not only the process of mutation that’s random. And contrary to what people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins claim, natural selection is also random…. The best that we can do is say, over geological time, that environments change randomly, because we don’t know why environments change. So you have environments that change randomly, natural selection is random, and mutations are random. So, you’ve got what statisticians would call two random variables, and the product of two random variables is again a random variable, which means the entire theory is essentially stochastic [random] in nature…. It is science with a category of chance and accident—all the structures of living systems.
CF: Which is why it can’t predict anything.
DB: Which is why it can’t predict anything.
Or they are not tellin’.
