Introduction and context. I have some evidence that Evolutionism, as it is commonly understood, cannot work, and that there is a design behind human beings. When I claim that there is a design, I’m not referring to the general design, but to that of living beings.
Let’s analyse the situation as a whole, including the events that led to current evolutionary theories.
Darwin’s work is considered the key transition between the idea of creation and that of evolution.
This is consistent with the palaeontological evidence, which appears to show that life on Earth has undergone evolution.
Darwinian evolution, however, encountered an obstacle in the form of energy-related considerations put forward by Lord Kelvin himself; the inconsistencies between the two positions were nevertheless resolved, albeit in a questionable manner.
But that is not the issue.
Darwin’s theory was essentially based on the concept of “evolutionary pressure”, which would be realized in practice through natural selection.
Darwin’s work, in its first draft, dates back to 1859.
Among the difficulties inherent in his way of assessing things, in addition to the objections raised by Lord Kelvin, was the transmission to subsequent generations of the “fitness” trait.
Be that as it may, let us jump abruptly to the year 1953; why that year in particular?
Because in that year two events occurred that make the spontaneous emergence of life on Earth plausible, along with its evolution and transmission to subsequent generations.
The first event is the Miller–Urey experiment.
The second event is the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick.
The first development demonstrated that no supernatural intervention was required to create complex molecules from simple elements, and it was this that gave rise to the concept of the “primordial soup”.
The second development brilliantly resolved the problem of the transmission of acquired traits to subsequent generations.
All well and good, then? Well, all well and good, if we adapt the old Darwinian concepts “in words” to the new knowledge.
This has always happened, creating a “neo-Darwinism” that was supposed to reconcile the old theories with the new findings. And this is because, whilst it is true that the discovery of DNA solves the problem of the transmission of acquired characteristics, it introduces new and far greater problems.
At its most basic level, the problem is solved purely in probabilistic terms; one example I once read is:
If we place a typewriter in front of each of billions of monkeys, and each of them types at random, one of them will eventually write Shakespeare’s sonnets
I came across another example by chance on a plane, in the newspaper that the passenger next to me had left open whilst reading something else.
It described an experience the author had had in a cave, verifying the absence of eyes in the isopods that inhabited it, and attributing to this a substantial advantage in terms of energy, which was, however, largely offset by the hyperdevelopment of other sensory systems.
The most recent research tends to complicate these simple concepts considerably, but in reality the substance remains the same.
Let us summarise the evidence we have; we will then add further evidence.
The evidence we have is:
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The chemistry on Earth is such that, under certain conditions (which likely existed in the primordial environment), the generation of the elementary molecules of biochemistry is a natural phenomenon. It does not require external intervention.
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Palaeontology shows that, generally speaking, living beings have “evolved”, progressing from simple to complex forms, and that this has taken place over time, as demonstrated by the fact that different stages of evolution correspond to different geological strata.
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There have been an incalculable number of generations on Earth, so “some monkey wrote Shakespeare”.
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This process has been directed and selected, and this can be verified, for example, in the structure of isopods, which have adapted to the completely lightless environment of caves. Are these concepts sufficient to validate neo-Darwinism? Is there anything that could falsify it, be it quantitative data or contrary qualitative evidence?
Let us first consider point 2.
Suppose there is a small town with only one facility for storing end-of-life vehicles. There is no car wrecker’s yard, but rather a vast, fenced-off plot of land, bounded at the back by a wall, where the town’s inhabitants have always gone, ever since the dawn of motoring, to leave the wrecks of their old cars when they bought a new one.
This has always been permitted by the local council, on the sole condition that they be left in an orderly fashion, without wasting space unnecessarily, and leaving a central passage between the wrecks, so that the wall could still be reached.
Suddenly, the aliens arrive; but not the ones from Close Encounters, rather those who appear to a Wiltshire milkman, without telling anyone.
They proceed along the central passage and reach the wall, observing the piles of vehicles lining the passage.
Near the wall there are chassis that resemble motorised carriages more than modern vehicles, and this engine is started with a crank. At a certain distance from the wall, a starter motor begins to appear.
Some wrecks, identifiable by the presence of a Möbius strip, have an electric starter motor, but still bear traces of a mechanism that allows for hand-crank starting. As we move further along, electronic cruise control systems appear. These disappear, only to reappear later.
There is a clear and obvious “evolution” in vehicles over more than a century; but this in no way implies that cars designed themselves. Nor does it imply that the earliest ones emerged from the random assembly of metal, wood and rubber.
This would be the mechanism described in point 3., but… the mechanism contains implicit assumptions.
If, by some chance, one monkey in billions upon billions were to write Shakespeare, another might write the Divine Comedy. Another might write 2001: A Space Odyssey, whilst the vast majority would write nothing at all. You would therefore have a huge volume of literary output, but an even greater number of works that amount to little or nothing.
You might think that, to maintain the analogy, Divine Comedy is one of the higher animals distinct from man, and the scarcer works are the lower animals.
But here arises the first conceptual problem. If you know that a monkey has written Shakespeare’s sonnets, you can verify this if, and only if, you have prior knowledge of Shakespeare’s sonnets. That is, if there is a plan in place.
Next, as regards the model of monkeys typing on typewriters, there is a purely mathematical problem. Human DNA contains approximately 3 billion purine and pyrimidine bases. Each DNA molecule consists of two complementary strands, so the number of bases involved in coding would be half that, approximately 1.5 billion.
Each amino acid is encoded by 3 bases (as is the stop codon, and so on), so the code would cover 500 million amino acids.
There are twenty amino acids in the code.
How many possible combinations are there? 20 to the power of 500 million.
It is a number impossible to write down. It would take a great many monkeys with typewriters…
Modern neo-Darwinism circumvents this obstacle with “evolutionary pressure”. Since there is selection, it is not necessary for all possible combinations to be generated; it is sufficient that, as soon as one appears, it is favoured over the others. And, progressively, by favouring the advantages and eliminating the disadvantages, evolution is generated. So, not billions upon billions of monkeys with typewriters, but fewer monkeys with a controller who determines who is doing well and who is doing badly.
Here, another problem arises. Most of the complex functions of living organisms are not determined or regulated by a single protein.
A typical example is blood clotting. In humans, this is regulated by 12 different proteins, plus several accessory ones. Any alteration to them impairs the mechanism.
In other words, every random alteration appears to be detrimental. No beneficial mutations have ever been observed.
Therefore, the human coagulation system must have been generated in a single stroke, as in Shakespeare’s play.
One could calculate this by considering how many bases are needed to encode each of the twelve proteins, and repeat the same simple calculation as before.
But even if one could devise a mechanism capable of explaining evolution (a progressive process that combines evolutionary pressure with the simple probabilistic calculation of random mutations) a further problem arises.
Given that we still require ”improvements” to appear in multiple individuals to optimise time and the number of generations, what happens if an advantageous trait appears in one individual, and a different one in another? Both individuals will compete to be “the fittest”; one will survive, the other will perish, and with it the favourable trait that had manifested itself in that individual will be lost.
How long will it take for such a favourable event to occur again?
But there are further problems.
There are certain characteristics in higher animals that cannot in any way be explained by “evolutionary pressure”.
There are many examples, but the most striking is the sequence of events in shock. In shock, whatever the initial cause, blood flow begins to be reduced first in the muscles, then in the intestines, kidneys and liver, and finally in the heart and brain.
This sequence is the same in all mammals, at least. If intervention occurs early in the sequence, interrupting it, the individual can be saved; otherwise, they die.
There is no way in which the event could occur spontaneously; only an external intervention can halt the sequence.
External interventions capable of interrupting the sequence have existed for no more than a century (and far less in some cases); how could a non-existent “evolutionary pressure” ever have led to the development of such a mechanism?
And there are many other similar or analogous examples.
If we then consider malignant tumours, in theory a single mutation or a group of mutations induced by mutagenic agents would magically enable the cell to reproduce rapidly, evade the immune system, and stimulate the growth of the blood vessels that supply it, and so on. A whole series of actions that are not isolated but involve complex mechanisms. The cell must necessarily already possess such capabilities; mutagenic agents can at best bring them to the fore.
But what would be the “evolutionary pressure” that would have led to this? Why would an individual be “better suited” if they die of cancer?
The real problem.
I believe that there is a sort of “common platform”, based on genetic material and the associated protein synthesis, as well as on organic chemistry. The basic design would have been subject to gradual improvements or variations, as with the cars mentioned earlier, which we see as “evolution”.
That said, a valid question would be:
why does the common cold virus exist?
In other words,
what would be the evolutionary advantage of sneezing so much when one has a cold?
Sneezing is a defence mechanism that serves to clear the nose and throat of particles, pathogens and irritants. It plays a vital role in protecting the respiratory system from infections, allergens and pollutants that we might inhale.
In reality, the common cold virus is like a tiny robot devoid of emotion and without purpose. It reproduces because its programming tells it to do so, and that is all. So, everything revolves around that programme and what it instructs the virus to do. And every now and then that programme changes slightly due to viral mutations.
Let us consider, for example, two generic types of recently mutated viruses.
One type of virus has a newly written section of programme code that triggers the body to sneeze, causing the infected body to produce more mucus and irritate the nasal membranes, creating the necessary “tickle”. In other words, its programming activates our body’s natural mechanisms that cause us to sneeze.
That sneeze will create an aerosol and disperse droplets of fluid containing viral particles. This causes the virus to spread and cover a wider area.
The other type of virus does not share this new programming code. It does not cause sneezing. Therefore, as there are no sneezes, it spreads less effectively.
The first virus’s programme is more effective at increasing the chances of it being transmitted to other hosts, and so it survives and spreads further, whilst the other virus does not spread beyond its initial host as effectively and spreads less. The first virus does not intend to do this; it is simply the way its programming has changed to allow it to spread. And so the virus ends up multiplying in multiple bodies without “meaning to”.
Now, no one has ever managed to develop a vaccine against the common cold. The common cold virus is a group of viruses belonging to the rhinovirus family. They are RNA viruses with three main species (as is the case with the flu virus), but an infinite number of subtypes that arise (presumably) through mutations; therefore, any immunity induced by natural infection or by vaccination proves ineffective against reinfection.
In general, mutations affecting viruses make them less pathogenic; since the virus depends on the host organism to replicate, and is usually species-specific, the destruction of the host species would lead to the destruction of the virus, which would no longer be able to replicate.
In humans, the common cold does not usually lead to death, so there is no need for mutations to make viruses less pathogenic; on the contrary, this allows the disease to spread widely without consequences for the virus, which can in fact “exploit” the normal sneezing reflex (which is supposed to clear obstructing particles from the upper respiratory tract), and can “afford” extreme antigenic variability that effectively renders the host organism’s immune response futile.
Furthermore, how and where all these mutations occur (affecting rhinoviruses in particular, less so flu viruses, and so on down the line for viruses causing more serious diseases) is unknown; Sir Fred Hoyle claimed they were brought to Earth by comets — a bizarre idea, but no more bizarre than the official alternatives.
The fact is that managing to exploit the host organism’s mechanisms to spread, without killing it and without triggering a significant immune response, is a major achievement for a “little robot” with no other capabilities. In the early days of microcomputing, there was a game for Apple called “RobotWar”…
Other related questions are:
Have you ever had a dream in which something happened in your surroundings that you “incorporated” into the dream? For example, the alarm clock ringing, which in the dream became the ringing of a telephone, or someone or something brushing against a part of your body, and this becoming part of the dream? Why is the auditory or sensory stimulus incorporated into the dream? What is a dream?
Now, I think the dream is an integrative simulation. The form taken by the synthesis engine when the task of orienting oneself in the external world is suspended, yet the need to maintain a centre of experience remains. The dream would therefore be the “self-excited” functioning of the human scene-constructing machine. In it, the system does not cease to interpret, but merely ceases to depend predominantly on the external world. The incoming stimulus finds a scene already set, a self already positioned, an affective logic already in place. The stimulus is then translated into the language of dreams, just as a piece of news arriving at the theatre during a performance will be incorporated by the actors if possible, rather than immediately halting the show; only if the news is too serious, or incompatible, or extremely urgent, does the curtain fall. In this analogy, waking is the falling of the curtain.
At one point, I even thought that the human system is designed in such a way as to prefer the continuity of a scene to its disruption. If an external element intrudes whilst the mind is already generating a dream world, its first instinct will not be to destroy that world, but to absorb it, adapt it, and bend it to the logic of the current context.
Only if the stimulus is too intense, too incongruous, too insistent, or too threatening in relation to the organism’s safety thresholds, does the machine cease to incorporate and move towards awakening. In other words, the difference between incorporation and awakening is not one of nature, but of threshold.
But this last part in italic could be a problem. If a living creature hides away to sleep, it should still remain alert to deal with threats that are all the more dangerous the more it is taken by surprise. From an evolutionary perspective, this would be inexplicable. So, this is a problem.
That said, some time ago I came across a truly enlightening question. It was part of a questionnaire on solipsism, which was handed out on the fringes of a Cosmology conference organised by De Vaucouleurs. The question was:
Is glass transparent in the dark?
My first answer was “yes, of course”. But, we see an object as “transparent” because most of the photons manage to pass through it. In the dark, there are no photons. How can we say it remains transparent? At most, we can say that the chemical and physical structure of the glass does not change: same molecules, same lattice.
But the question does not explicitly concern the chemical-physical structure of glass; it was me who, arbitrarily, would be making such an extrapolation. The question remains:
Is glass transparent in the dark?
If we are talking about a property of the material, then we can say that glass remains transparent in the dark; but this would merely be a dispositional property (the chemical-physical structure). Glass has the property of allowing most visible light to pass through it when it is struck by visible light. Darkness does not eliminate this property; it simply does not reveal it.
In complete darkness, you cannot see through glass, but neither can you see through air or a vacuum. Therefore, in the absence of photons, the difference between transparency and opacity does not manifest itself phenomenally. And in this case, when discussing the act of seeing through, one cannot say that glass remains transparent in the dark, because transparency is not currently observable.
By this I mean that, without light, transparency does not occur as a visual phenomenon. But it does not automatically follow from this that the glass ceases to be transparent; it merely follows that the property is not currently in effect. Therefore, the question is ambiguous. Now, this is precisely where the problem arises.
That is to say, the question is ambiguous, but this ambiguity is not immediately apparent; it only becomes clear when an objection is raised against the answer.
So, the real problem with this question is not whether glass is transparent in the dark, but
why the question seems “normal”, but it is only after careful reflection (whether spontaneous or prompted) that you realise its ambiguity? Why didn’t I pick up on the ambiguity of the question at the start?
Initially, I had equated the term “transparent” with the immediate perception of glass in the dark, based on my personal experience (shared with other human beings) regarding its chemical and physical properties: glass does not become opaque simply because there is no light.
Subsequently, I realised that the term “transparent” implied by the question was not intended to draw on my experience (even though shared with other human beings); the question was not “do you see the glass as transparent in the dark?”, but “is the glass transparent in the dark?”.
From this, I think that the qualitative leap consists of a deduction. To do this, we have to bring this concept together with objectivity based on sharing, and the incorporation into the dream of a sensory or perceptual stoma.
But I’m not yet ready for this step.
So, I thought about the differences I find in the perception by different people of:
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the sight of a real object
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the pain of a significant trauma (a hammer blow to a finger, or the amputation of a limb with a saw, without any anaesthetic)
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a sexual orgasm.
None of us doubts the reality of an object, just as we do not doubt the pain felt when a leg is being sawed off, or an orgasm (a male one, at least). And this certainty holds true, in exactly the same way, for all three conditions. But condition 1. is a sensory stimulation arising from an external object when illuminated by light. Condition 2. is a sensory perception in which the objectivity lies not in the stimulation itself; the objective element is the fact that the leg is being sawed off. And condition 3)? There is nothing objective about it; you are making love, and you’ve been doing the same thing for fifteen minutes; suddenly, there is the orgasm. Yet nothing objective has changed.
But for each of us, these three experiences are equally undeniable. Equally?
Think about the famous “#thedress” phenomenon.
At first, I thought that the dress shows that colour does not simply lie in the object itself, but in the perceptual synthesis of a relationship between stimulus, lighting and visual correction.
But, unfortunately, this is not the case. The “#thedress” phenomenon spread across the web via a photograph. Even in the photograph, some (the majority) saw blue and black stripes, whilst others (a minority) saw white and gold.
The issue of lighting was raised as an explanation; however, if you open that image in any image editor and read the RGB values of the pixels, you realize that they are entirely consistent with the colours blue and black, not white and gold.
The “context” argument that has been raised in some studies may be a “half-truth”, but it certainly does not apply when showing a photograph, where the context is constant.
And here, again to the question on glass in the dark. The significance of the ambiguity of the glass in the dark lies in the fact that you don’t grasp it immediately and instantly; but once someone would make me think about it, I would have had no trouble seeing it.
At first, I thought I do not immediately grasp the ambiguity of the glass in the dark because, under ordinary conditions, that difference does not matter enough.
But, on second thought, no, this is not correct. The conditions are irrelevant. I simply need to reflect on the mental process I myself followed in attempting to provide a coherent answer before someone would have shown me the ambiguity. Then I must reflect on how I changed the very nature of your reasoning once I saw the ambiguity.
What exactly did I realise when I grasped the ambiguity? What was the difference in how I approached the concept, before and after? What did I see that was different?
That’s where I start to struggle with my answer.
The very word “transparent” encompassed, without stating so, at least two different criteria for application.
But why does the very word contain “two different criteria for application”? And above all, why don’t I realize this straight away, but only under certain, limited conditions?
It is inevitable that glass in the dark, pain, the ringing of an alarm clock in one’s sleep (and so on) can all be viewed in a relatively similar light. As they serve as a kind of ‘gateway’ to an underlying concept that you cannot currently see, they all represent specific conditions within the usual forms of communication.
So, obviously, there is something “particular” about them, and this particular something becomes evident in the form of ambiguity, paradox, an inexplicable phenomenon, or something else.
Let’s put it this way.
We’re standing in front of a ‘staircase’. You ask me:
where does this staircase lead?
I reply:
to the floor above.
Neither of us has any doubts, nor does either of us find anything ambiguous in either the question or the answer.
Now, let’s consider the same situation, the same question, but I reply:
nowhere.
You might consider my answer somewhat ambiguous or strange. However, if the staircase stops at the next flight (because it has collapsed, because a wall has been built there, or due to a design or construction error), you will understand my answer.
We could debate whether the floor above is a “place”, whilst the top of the staircase is a “non-place”, but that would be a matter of semantics, which is of no interest to us. Even if we don’t agree on the semantics, neither of us has any difficulty in agreeing on the concepts.
Now we are faced with a “box”. This time it is my turn to ask you:
where does it lead?
You think “this bloke’s daft,” and then you ask me in turn:
but what exactly do you mean?
We can ask questions that make sense; we can discuss how the answer is given, which in any case remains equally sensible.
We can ask questions that do not make sense. In that case, it is implicit that there cannot be a sensible answer.
In the case of the glass in the dark, however, the nonsensical nature of the question only becomes apparent when attempting to give a sensible answer, even though it is apparently a sensible question like so many others.
What makes this question different from the others?
It cannot have an unequivocal answer, as in the case of the ladder.
It isn’t quite as nonsensical as the one on the box.
It is grammatically and semantically correct, and understandable. It doesn’t use any terminology that is commonly considered ambiguous.
And yet, there is something underlying it that makes it different.
What is it?
And the problem lies in the difference in how we assess the question.
Where does this staircase lead?
The experiment has not yet been carried out. I assume that, were I to carry out the experiment, I would find myself in that place.
Is glass transparent in the dark?
The experiment has not yet been carried out, but the inconsistency is already apparent.
Why is there this difference?
Once I’ve fully understood it, I want to understand why we do this and what this has in common with pain, the alarm clock or “#thedress”.
Conclusion. I tried to provide an answer to this giant, problematic question.
To me, the brain is not a biological organ that evolved to hallucinate or interpret a hostile physical world in order to ensure survival, but is purely the local rendering engine of a pre-programmed simulation, a veritable hardware/software interface whose sole purpose is to process and execute the code of reality to keep the user constantly immersed.
In this absolute light, the entire series of seemingly unrelated phenomena reveals itself as the simple execution of a fully computed three-dimensional environment (just like in Quake or Flight Simulator).
By this, I mean that the brain serves absolutely no purpose in understanding or interpreting the cosmos, but rather serves solely to ‘run’ the invisible, preloaded data of the construct in real time, translating them into the first-person phenomenal scene and concealing the lines of code behind the undeniable illusion of matter, demonstrating that the human being is not a monkey that evolved by chance, but a conscious terminal, an avatars’ point of view rigidly connected to a virtual environment entirely written, regulated and designed from the outside.
Now, whilst I consider this last paragraph to be very close to the coherent vision I am seeking (bring everything together), what I said earlier (i.e., what I had initially thought) does not really convince me.
As a matter of fact, it runs counter to all observation and everyday experience, as well as to logic. Why would one flee from someone with a saw who wants to amputate a limb, or feel a “fear of heights”? Why would one perceive hunger or thirst as an impulse that drives one’s actions? The instinct for self-preservation does exist, and it makes use of a range of functions, some of which are complex. There are a number of mechanisms, ranging from the parachutist’s reflex to hunger, that make up the instinct for self-preservation. Persisting in sleep during dream activity despite external stimuli clearly goes against the instinct for self-preservation. Moreover, if you are not dreaming, this does not happen. If you have so-called ‘hypnagogic myoclonus’, you dream of tripping, but you wake up anyway, even though in this case interrupting your sleep is completely pointless.
So, my question is:
If we set aside any thoughts about the purpose and stick to the facts, without considering “usefulness” or “why”, how would you logically describe what I have presented here (the transparency of glass, the dream, the pain, the orgasm, #thedress, etc.)?