A PREPOSTEROUS THEORY
A PREPOSTEROUS THEORY
Dr. David Berlinski is an American author and academic who opposes the “scientific consensus” on the theory of evolution. He is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. He was a research assistant in molecular biology at Columbia University, and was also a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France.
Berlinski believes that the Darwinian theory of how life originated is a “preposterous theory”. He also believes that he is not alone in this regard and that there is significant opposition to the Darwinian theory in the scientific community. This opposition includes mathematicians, physicists, and biologists. Many, he said, don’t even regard “Darwinian evolution” as a scientific theory.
Berlinski believes it is preposterous that a cow could evolve into a whale. He notes that at least 50,000 morphological changes are needed for this to happen. Further, all of these structural modifications are linked together and must be coordinated. Theoretically, these 50,000 changes would “evolve” through mutations and natural selection. Preposterous!
The following parable illustrates the absurdity of evolution. I am not certain where it originated, but it was used by Berlinski. I have taken the liberty of condensing it for this brief article. “The original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576. Since none of the brothers could read Spanish the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey, of copying the Quixote. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor’s Los Hombres d’Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza’s remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and _ indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Flaubert Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined. ”
PREPOSTEROUS!
Copying errors, like mutations, are invariably harmful. The idea that monks making errors in copying Don Quixote produced other novels is preposterous, just like evolution. The idea that accidentally dropping hot solder on the mother board of your computer will improve it is preposterous. So also is the idea that copying errors will not compromise a manuscript. The idea that monks making “errors” in copying Don Quixote could produce an “evolutionary tree” from which all novels evolved is preposterous. Yet this is basically what we are supposed to “believe” if evolution is true.
“If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.” (From The Devil's Delusion by Dr. David Berlinski)