“David Gelernter isn’t someone you’d expect to reject Darwin. He lives and works at the heart of the intellectual establishment. He’s a renowned computer scientist at Yale University — the New York Times called him a ‘rock star’ — and served on the National Council on the Arts. He explained in a recent essay in the Claremont Review of Books why he no longer believes Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. He makes similar points in a recent interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson. Perhaps the biggest flaw with Darwinism, he writes, is how hard it would be to randomly make new functional proteins. Darwinian evolution depends on a huge number of them. Our understanding of molecular biology developed after Darwin. His theory doesn’t fit well with this new understanding. Gelernter carefully reviews the evidence, and his article provides a very helpful short guide to the problem. He cites Douglas Axe, a distinguished scientist, who has calculated the chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore be preserved by natural selection, are only 1 in 1077. That’s just one of the many, many proteins needed for any organism. Gelernter summarizes the evidence. ‘Immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is — so far — a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million — you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.’ He has plenty of other problems with Darwinism. Gelernter admits intelligent design is an ‘absolutely serious argument.’ It’s the ‘first, and obviously most intuitive one that comes to mind.’ It’s got to be dealt with intellectually. It can’t be dismissed with anti-religious bigotry. His colleagues have treated him courteously since he changed his position on this issue, he says. Still, for them Darwinism has passed beyond a scientific argument. ‘You take your life into your hands to challenge it intellectually. They will destroy you.’ He’s seen ‘nothing approaching free speech on this topic.’ It’s not a scientific or intellectual discussion. They think he’s attacking their ‘religion.’ Alas, he’s not hopeful that Darwinism will be phased out of academia anytime soon.” (See also “Evolutionists against Darwinism,” www.wayoflife.org.) ‘Renowned Yale Computer Science Prof Leaves Darwinism,” The Stream, Aug. 21, 2019 Comments are closed.
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