A Strong Delusion

Consolidating some old posts for newcomers.

I was just looking through some old posts and thought I’d consolidate some ideas into single, albeit longish, posts for newcomers to this Substack.

So here we go, consolidating thoughts on the topic of “A Strong Delusion”, and starting with our genome and a concept known as ‘genetic entropy’ - a concept that flies directly in the face of Darwinian evolution (which supposes the genome increases in complexity and order over time) but is in agreement with classical physics and our common sense observations of the material world. It will be a bit of a journey as there is some groundwork required for those not familiar with genetics - but don’t worry - I’ll write in layman’s terms and use lots of metaphor so you can easily get the concepts without having a masters degree in biology.

But first I wanted to just share something that has been motivating me for some time now around this topic. Not just because of the psycho-social-spiritual implications, but because it’s so frustrating that no one in Biology 101 even thinks to question the beginning of the so called evolutionary tree of life. Apparently the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Yet when I consider the beginnings of evolutionary history, for me, “nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.” Yet just about every mainstream scientist and philosopher, even my beloved Iain McGilchrist, are completely convinced that evolution must be the truth and anything else is a fairy tail.

Acclaimed neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, whom I deeply respect for his work on the neuroscience of emotions, wrote a book called The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. In that book he explains the beginning of the tree of life - LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) which was the first cell, or cells, derived from “protocells”, which were even earlier bits of RNA, DNA, and proteins floating around in the water before the first cell.

But where did the protocell RNA or DNA come from?

LeDoux cites an experiment from the ‘50s by Stanley Miller who tried to create the building blocks of life in a test tube by heating and zapping an atmosphere of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane. He did produce some amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. But then we jump from producing a few amino acids to RNA or DNA - an incredibly complex structure even for the simplest of living things. There’s no explanation for how such a structure came about.

One of the simplest organisms, genetically, that we know about is Mycoplasma genitalium, with 525 genes comprised of 580,070 base pairs. What are the chances this combination of genetic code came about by chance? Say you had to guess what the combination of a lock was on a highly secure vault. You have to punch in a combination of letters (a base-pair sequence) that looks a bit like this: ATCGATTGAGCTCTAGCG (this is just 9 pairs in a DNA sequence, A-T always go together and G-C always go together, you have to guess 580,070 of these pairs). But that’s assuming the zapping of an atmosphere can produce enough guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, in close proximity for the many trials required to produce this particular sequence. But then what? Let’s say you, or the random non-intelligent process of evolution, correctly guessed the right sequence to have a viable strand of DNA. What’s going to happen to it? You’ve got a strand of free-floating DNA (just like at the beginning of the film Prometheus when the alien humanoid drinks a potion and breaks down into the water) and it needs to be encapsulated by something. It needs a cell wall, a lipid casing. There are a number of theories as to how RNA or DNA might have been encapsulated but none seem plausible nor reproducible. We’ve not been able to encapsulate a strand of RNA by say a foam barrier of iron sulphide (one of the theories) and observe that encapsulated RNA spring to life. But somehow we have to jump from this miracle of random sequencing of nucleic acids somehow encapsulated in something, to the first cell LUCA, to a bacteria - the complexities of it’s internal components are mind boggling. (For a deep dive into cellular complexities check out Dr Jon Lieff’s book The Secret Language of Cells).

In the Annual Review of Microbiology there is an article on E. coli, supposed to be a primitive, ‘simple’ bacteria, the authors wrote:

Even though the entire sequence of the E. coli K-12 chromosomal DNA has been known for [over] two years, we are still far from knowing all of the details of how the cell operates, lives, replicates, coordinates, and adapts to changing circumstances . . . the number of experimental journal articles on aspects of the basic biology of E. coli has increased from an average of 78 per month in 1996 to an average of 94 per month today . . . new biological information about this well-studied organism continues to roll in. New metabolic capabilities are discovered and are connected to underlying genes. There are new regulation systems, new transport systems, and more information on cellular constituents and cellular processes.

. . . but how many regulators are needed to maintain coordination of expression of the genes and correct interaction among the gene products? Regulation systems are not the same in all bacteria, and we still do not have all of the information for the regulatory networks of even one bacterial species . . . the minimal set of genes and proteins necessary for life of an independently replicating cell does not have an easy answer.

Experimentation into details of the biology of E. coli continues unabated today, and the numbers of papers published annually continues to increase . . . not all enzymes and pathways in E. coli are known . . . besides genes for unknown enzymes, we have data for enzymes that don't have genes. There are 55 enzymes of E. coli that have been isolated, purified and characterized over the years, but their genes have never been identified.

The advent of massive DNA-sequencing technology and the completion to date of [more than] 20 microbial genomes that are now available to the public have not brought us (yet) to a complete understanding of exactly how a single free-living cell functions and adapts to changing environments. (Riley, M., Serres, M.H., "Interim report on genomics of Escherichia coli" Annual Review of Microbiology, 2000 pp. 341-411.)

Does this sound like a simple organism to you? Does it sound like something that could just come about randomly, even if, somehow, a correctly organised strand of RNA was encapsulated in some sort of membrane?

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of faith one has to have to believe life sprung up randomly (the so called ‘Blind Watchmaker’) without any intelligent design.

The Genome

The genome refers to all of the elements that make up the genetic “instruction manual” that specifies how cells form in structure and function. It is a vast instruction manual, more like an entire library than a single manual, consists of 3 billion individual letters for the human genome. There are only 4 molecular letters that form the genetic code, and in the case of DNA we symbolise those letters as A, T, C, and G. These letters pair together and we read them as a very long string of letters. Clusters of letter sequences  make up what we can imagine as words, and these clusters form genes (rather like the chapters of a book). Genes combine to form chromosomes (like volumes of a book) and these combine to form the genome (the library).

Small parts of this genetic code can be responsible for large changes in cellular development and there are large parts of the code that we don’t really know what it does.

This huge string of code is also a bit different to say reading a book, one word following the other until you get the the end - a linear progression. The genome consists of multiple layers of linear code that contain overlaps, loops and branches. And as much as I hate to use machine language to describe biology, it does seem that this genetic code is similar to computer language that has both linear and non-linear characteristics. There are encoded feedback loops - genes regulating genes that further regulate other genes, in real time in response to environmental conditions. It is a code that can rewrite portions of itself depending on various factors. (Others have compared DNA with a hard drive full of code and the RNA and protein molecules, and their interactions, as the active RAM of the cell.)

If it were a computer code we’d call it artificial intelligence of a very complex design rather than a random chance collection of computer characters. This multi-dimensional, dynamic and self-regulating genome is contained in a package smaller than any visible speck of dust. From this very tiny package comes the incredible capacity to direct cells into a multitude of forms and functions. The capacity of young neurons to migrate to just the right spot in the brain is amazing and the complexity of communication between cells is mind blowing. Sorry I realise these statements are not very satisfactory but I don’t have the scope to go into what is amazing and mind blowing just now - but I’d love to look at these things a bit further down the track and amaze you and blow your mind!

The Darwinian perspective on all this complexity is that it must have started from a very simple genome and after a long (a very long) series of mutations (errors in replication) and natural selection (most adaptable mutations survive and reproduce). In other words, errors in the genome add some benefit to the organism (and presumably more complexity)  and the organism with such mutations reproduce more than the non-mutated version. I don’t think I need to tease this out too much because this is what we have all been taught in school biology. Remember the tree of life diagram with a single cell organism at the base of the tree and as the tree goes up and branches out the animals become more complex with man somewhere at the top?  But is this the truth? As I outlined in the previous post - did a collection of free floating amino acids come together to form a primitive strand of DNA or RNA, and somehow get encapsulated into a membrane and somehow form the ‘machinery’ required to replicate and sustain it’s form?

To get a feel for what ‘machinery’ is required to replicate, check out this short video illustration of the replisome required for replication   

And if that isn’t complex enough for you, check out the function of the kinetochore (half way though this video):

These sorts of mechanisms are common to all cellular life, and I don’t know about you, but it seems highly improbably that this could have randomly come together in a ‘primordial soup’ with some zaps from lightening. But I have many highly intelligent colleagues who believe exactly that - even knowing the complexity, better than I, of cellular life (thus the name of this series).

There are many metaphorical illustrations trying to put the Darwinian idea into something we can easily grasp. A variation of such metaphors would be imagining a construction manual for a very simple toy car that is not just showing you what components fit with what components but instructions about sourcing the raw materials needed to create the rubber, plastic and metal parts, how to fabricate them into the required shapes, and then how to assemble. Even for a simple metal bodied, 2-axle/4-wheeled kids toy it would be a lot of words. Now say the manual is reproduced by hand, the scribe has no idea about building a toy car but just copies each letter from the original to the new, one by one - no checking context and no spell checking. Occasionally the scribe makes a mistake, he might add a letter where there was no letter originally, or a word might be misspelled or inadvertently replaced with a few other words (say the scribe had been drinking and it was late at night).

Now most of the errors in the new version wouldn’t cause much of a problem, you could still follow the manual and build the toy car. But somewhere along the line an error was made that actually improved the toy car - a word was inadvertently added that improved the smelting of the metal required to form the car body and wheels. This manual now becomes the new standard from which other manuals are copied. And further down the track there was a copy that contained errors that somehow suggested that a gear on the axle was an improvement and this became the new standard. Somehow more errors over a very long time produced a series of gears and a spring and a primitive mechanism for propelling the toy forwards (remember the scribe knows nothing about such technology and is only looking at one letter at a time and doing his best to replicate it - there’s no intelligence involved here).

After a very long time of new standard toy car manuals we arrive at the manual for the construction of the Starship Enterprise (as well as many other offshoot manuals that went onto describe all manner of functional machines), including the sourcing of raw materials, manufacture of parts, assembly, computer coding, all the technology involved.

I don’t believe this is hyperbole - the incredible complexity of the human body is probably more complex than the Starship Enterprise (except maybe the matter/antimatter warp drive, although it could turn out to be a rather simple manipulation of matter). Just look at protein folding for example - we have to employ the latest AI to work out what is happening in this very basic phenomenon of organic life.

To go from a simple metal toy car to even say a modern fighter jet, randomly, without any intelligent design, just a selection of the most capable product as a result of a bunch of mistakes, requires a lot of faith in the primary axiom to which Darwinian evolution rests.

Supposed mechanism for evolution

Mutations are the ‘mistakes’ that occur in the instruction manual we know as our DNA. Mutations are overwhelmingly negative for us, some of which cause debilitating pathologies and even aging itself is largely a result of accumulating mutations. Health policies generally (except for COVID policies) include aims to reduce mutations - mitigating the risk of cancers, degenerative diseases and all manner of other pathologies that result from the mutation of cells. Yet it is the mutation of cells that evolutionary theory holds up as the great mechanism that creates diversity for which selection of the fittest can be made.

So far we have not been able to identify an example of a random mutation that has created information that ends up beneficial to the newly modified organism. Certainly there are mutations that have destroyed information and may be beneficial to the organism in a local context. Antibiotic resistant bacterium have a chromosomal mutation causing it to be defective in a helpful way when it comes to antibiotics. But such a strain is quickly replaced by superior, non-mutant, strains once there is no antibiotic to deal with. The same with selective breeding of animals - there may be features that are amplified and other features that are suppressed, there may be local adaptation, like a hairless dog in a hot climate, but there is no new information being created. There is either selective features based on the existing information within the genome or a loss of information.

There are over 3 billion potential points of mutation in a human genome. Mutations are happening all the time and the vast majority of these don’t seem to have critical impacts on us (on the phenotype, that is, the whole functioning person). Sometimes a mutation will have an impact on us and will manifest in a way that is pathological - cancer, or being born with any number of disorders because our genetic code isn’t carrying out the proper instructions. These pathologies are obvious in the phenotype, but the more subtle ones, happening in ‘non-critical’ parts of our DNA are not so. Nevertheless they are still happening. With every generation very small, unnoticed mutations are happening that is degrading the highly organised information of our genome. We are not getting more fine tuned and evolving into better humans. It’s the exact opposite. We are becoming more mutant.

And dare I say that with the mRNA gene therapy jabs this state of genetic entropy has just accelerated profoundly.

Now more mutations should be a good thing right? I mean that’s how we get natural selection, by selecting the better mutations! But beneficial mutations are vanishingly rare and when there are any it’s at the loss of information, not adding information (remember we are considering a theory that takes us from a bacteria to Einstein - a lot of additional information).

But the problem with natural selection is that it is based on the selection of the whole organism, not selecting undetectable minor mutations of the genome. We have to see remarkable and beneficial mutations that add more useful information to the genome, for us to climb the evolutionary tree of life. So again, most mutations on the phenotype level are negative and not the ‘survival of the fittest’ type of subjects evolution is looking for. Evolution needs a high rate of beneficial mutations at the phenotype level, adding functional complexity, to be selectable - not mutations that are at best adaptive degeneration of the genome and thus shrinking the functional genome size and potential.

We are not evolving, we are devolving! There have been a lot of studies on the rates of deleterious mutations in human populations and all such researchers agree there is a lot of mutation going on - the rates, however, are debatable. To give you a bit of a feel for the numbers, a human mutation rate of 75-175 nucleotide substitutions (the mistakes in the DNA) per person per generation is widely accepted. However some believe the actual mutation rate is as high as 300. Whichever way you look at it, there is a lot of mutation going on in the opposite direction to evolutionary theory. In fact it’s much worse than this as there are many classes of mutations that can be passed on from one generation to the next. Among these mutation classes are mitochondrial mutations, nucleotide substitutions, satellite mutations, deletions, duplications/insertions, inversions/translocations, conversions, which can add up to possibly thousands of mutations per person per generation. Now again, most of these are not detected at the whole person level, but we are being mutated with each generation nevertheless. Most human geneticists will agree that the human race is genetically degenerating , with information being lost and thus reduced fitness of our species. This reduced fitness may be somewhere between 1%-5% per generation. We are in trouble and so is the theory of evolution!

Now with this in mind let me tell you a little metaphorical story about natural selection - somewhat contrived but it will give you a bit of a handle on the selection problem…

I’ve got a large book in my library, Principles of Neural Science. It’s as big as my Oxford Dictionary and could possibly kill you if it fell from my high shelf onto your head. It’s dense 1,706 pages is crammed with highly specific and complex information. This book will be a stand-in for your DNA, albeit a ridiculously simplified substitute.

Now say this book was printed with a faulty print-on-demand printer that would insert typographical errors now and then. I estimate this book has just over 1 million words and about three thousand diagrams, so let’s say the printer makes 10,000 spelling errors and 30 errors in the diagrams (about 1% error rate) in each book it prints. The errors are completely random for each book it prints (these are the random mutations - think of the letters as nucleotides and the ‘book + student results’ as the whole organism).

The book goes out to all the undergraduate students learning about neuroscience, each student getting a uniquely ‘mutated’ book. The book is so large and the spelling errors so few, that for the most part students learn a significant amount about neuroscience and few are severely handicapped. There may be the odd spelling mistake, like one unfortunate, albeit rare, incident where the title came out as “Pinaples Of Neubal Science”, but the student is still relatively sure she has the right textbook and isn’t that phased (and ends up putting a bright pineapple sticker over the title anyway to avoid embarrassment).

At the end of the semester the students are tested and ranked - the very best student’s books are taken as the “best copies of Principles of Neural Science”, and naturally they are selected to be the basis for next semester’s students. These books are then fed into our somewhat unreliable print-on-demand machine as the starting point for a fresh batch of textbooks. Now, the next generation of copies has the same error rate of 1%, but this on top of the previous error rate of 1% - so the text slightly degrades again because of random errors. Seemingly no new theories or more accurate descriptions of endoplasmic reticulum membranes come about because of these random errors. Surprisingly the diagram on page 1204 of different neurotrophic factors promoting the survival of distinct populations of dorsal root ganglion neurons, doesn’t become more clear. In fact some very precise placements of letters and numbers get jumbled up and confusing for the student on that particular diagram.

Once again students are rated at the end of the semester and the top student’s books are taken as the starting point for the next generation of text books. Again, with the same random error rate.

How many generations of ‘mutations’ do you think it will take to ‘select’ a more improved version of Principles of Neural Science that will end up serving students even better than the original version?

The fitness (total biological function of the organism) of the book is what selection is acting on, but in which direction is fitness going in? This is genetic entropy, not increased complexity and order.

This is to illustrate the selection aspect of evolution - we have to select the whole book, not just bits from within the book.

But of course the metaphor doesn’t go far enough to grasp the implausible scenario (remember we need to go from the first ‘simple’ cell to Einstein) - we’d have to start with something like the Neuroscience for Dummies cheat sheet (still an impressive combination of letters to create an intelligible code for learning) in the memory of our slightly faulty print-on-demand printer. The errors from the printer in every generation of printing the cheat sheet would have to eventually produce the actual book Neuroscience for Dummies or some equivalent. And then, using the same method of selection as above, produce eventually, a copy of Principles of Neural Science, fifth edition, and then, eventually, improve on that work to get to the sixth edition. The printer knows nothing about neuroscience of course and the spelling errors (mutations) are completely random.

Now you might stop and think, “Wait a minute Winston! What about all those genetically modified plants we have that are drought resistant and can produce more fruit!? Isn’t that evolution right before our eyes!!”

Well, no. Breeding plants and animals selectively can produce better attributes for certain conditions but it’s not adding information (unless you are genetically engineering and inserting sequences, and that is not part of Darwinian theory). Selection can sometimes produce helpful local adaptations but it cannot create more complex genomes. And from what we know about human mutations we seems to be careening down the river of entropy in the opposite direction to evolutionary theory.

Let’s leave genetics for a moment and go on a fanciful trip to illustrate a point…

It’s 2156 and you are on the Intergalactic Starship The Improbable, searching the vastness of space for any signs of life. You’ve been woken up by the ship’s AI, Karen, from your suspended animation pod.

“We have arrived at Quadrant 25497 and I’ve detected possible lifeforms,” announced Karen in that typical male, oscillating to female, and then back to male voice with random accents from around the world, typical of your starship’s vintage - irritable but equitable.

You make your way to the observation deck to see a large spherical object reminiscent of the Death Star from that old 20th century story Star Wars.

A landing party is organised and you are selected, as the ships mathematician, to be part of the encounter.

As your landing vehicle approaches the Death-Star-like object you see written, across what could possibly be construed as its ‘equator’ line, the words “Univers-O-Matic™” (in raised Times New Roman font), stretching out for kilometres in a polished silver finish. Underneath in smaller lettering were the words “Build Your Own Life Sustaining Universe”, and in very small lettering below that again were the words, “Conditions Apply.”

Once you landed safely inside the large, yet completely empty, landing pad and the outer doors closed behind you, a rush of air filled the void. Surprisingly the atmosphere and artificial gravity caters to you and your team perfectly.

A screen splutters to life above the large door that is obviously the way into the complex.

“Who is it?” Blurts out someone with an English accent.

An old man appears on the screen seemingly rather agitated. Well mostly his large nose filled the screen but enough of his face also flashed by momentarily as he tried to adjust the camera. Long white hair in a tangled mess suggests he wasn’t expecting guests.

“What do you want?” It seemed he was rudely interrupted from much needed sleep, that would explain the hair, or something like that.

“Ah… we are from a neighbouring galaxy… and we saw your…”

“Do you want to make a UNIVERSE?!” The old man interrupted, still rather agitated.

You look around at each other and shrug your shoulders.

“Well I guess so… Yes, we would like to make a universe!” Everyone nods in agreement. No one has any idea what’s happening.

“That’ll be a fiver,” he says with a bit of a sigh, as if he’s had to make that very same request for “a fiver” a hundred times today.

The old man automatically reaches for a lever to his side and trap doors open up beneath you and your team as you fall into a tube of some sort. Before you realise what is happening the trap doors close above you, the tube opening closes and you are propelled forward at a high speed by a massive punch of compressed air.

After a few harrowing twists and turns you spill out into a very large room. You gather yourselves together and notice the room has a lot of spinning wheels, some the size of a dinner plate and others with a diameter reaching hundreds of feet into the air. It was like a huge muddle of vertical roulette wheels, obviously some sort of analogue calculator you think to yourself.

“What’s this all for,” you ask the old man who’s now standing beside you.

“This is the ‘Room of Fine Tuning’,” he says with an air of pride, looking up toward the ceiling.

“And what happens here?” You ask as he continue is upward gaze.

“This is where the parameters of your universe are decided,” he explained, still looking up at the largest wheel with a sense of awe.

“Ah…, OK, so we just set whatever parameters we like?”

“Noooo me laddie, you have to spin the exact right numbers for your life sustaining universe to come into existence,” he says in a measured and serious tone, thick with what you now believe is a Scottish accent (you think you can hear an orchestral underscore emphasising the weightiness of the moment).

“So what are the right numbers then?” The obvious question to ask in the given situation.

“Well me laddie I just can’t help you there, it’s a random thing you know?” He smiles rather annoyingly.

“What do you mean it’s a random thing?” You fire back.

“You don’t think a universe is anything but a random event… do you?”

“No, no. No, of course not,” you respond, a little confused. “So what did my five quid just purchase me?”

“A chance to SPIN TO WIN!” A sudden fanfare blasts out from somewhere high above in the enormous room and everyone reflexively reaches for their sidearm. (You also realise the orchestral underscore must have been real and not your imagination after all).

After the old man explains to you that each wheel represents certain variables and conditions that need to be present for your universe to come into existence he takes you to the first set of wheels - They are enormous. He explains that you get one spin on each wheel and whatever numbers they land on will determine if your universe will be born and be able to sustain life. If it doesn’t you have to pay another five pounds for another go.

The wheels, a lot of them, were arranged in a number of groupings, one group called “Initial Conditions”, another “Expansion”, another “Life”.

The “Initial Conditions” set of wheels were a couple of dozen that set the parameters for the initial conditions for matter and energy, gravitation, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, the masses of every elementary particle, and so on. All requiring very specific tolerances to produce the right conditions for the birth of a universe that would ultimately support life.

The “Expansion” set of wheels included conditions such as expansion rate, the cosmological constant, gravitational attraction strength, a bunch of ratios like the ratio between electromagnetic forces and the strong nuclear force.

The “Life” set of wheels were to determine the exact conditions for the formation of the elements to create beryllium and helium and then subsequently carbon. Further wheels had something to do with combinations of elements and the required conditions - these were very large.

All the wheels had a lot of numbers around the edge that could only be seen with a high powered microscope, and some looked like they were blurry and glitching.

“What’s with the blurry, glitchy wheels over there?” you ask the old man.

“Higher dimensional wheels me laddie!” he says puffing out his chest.

“What does that mean?”

“Well look over at that one in the Expansion set. That’s the wheel for all the possibilities of the cosmological constant. There are 10 to the 90th power of possibilities and you have to get one specific one. We can’t fit 10 to the 90th power of possibilities on a normal wheel so we have to use a higher dimensional wheel so it can all fit into one spin of the wheel,” the old man explains.

“What! 10 to the 90th power! There are only 10 to the 80th power, or something like that, particle in the known universe!” You say, suddenly realising the difficulty of randomly landing on the one special number required. The old man just raised his bushy eyebrows and nodded in agreement.

Exasperated you ask the old man where to start, which wheel to spin first.

“Ahhh… Spin the ‘Low Entropy State’ wheel! It’s a doozy!” Another fanfare blasts from somewhere high up in the ceiling.

You look over at one of the blurry, higher dimension wheels, flickering like a poorly projected image on a moving canvas.

“What are the chances I get the right number on this one?” You ask.

“Well you have one chance in 10 to the 10th to the 123rd power,” he says with a bit of a smirk.1

“Ah, what? Ten to the power of ten to the power of one hundred and twenty three?”

“That’s right me laddie,” he laughed. The ‘laddie’ thing was wearing thin.

You realise that it was going to be difficult to land on the one correct number. You also realise that even if you did land on that one chance out of 10 to the 10th to the 123rd power, you still had many dozens of other wheels to spin and land on the right number. If one was incorrect your life bearing universe would fail. You are a mathematician but these numbers are beyond you.

Heck, just spin the damn wheel.

The fanfare erupted once again into the vast cavern of a room and the Low Entropy State wheel flashed width colourful lights and a deep rumble. Suddenly it stopped and a huge red cross flashed across the room and the sound of a buzzer from those old game shows indicated that the number was WRONG! You didn’t get the right value to define the entropy state of a particle at the singularity of the Big Bang to kick-start your very own universe. No surprise really. And no point in going on if the very first variable was unable to even start anything.

“Woohoo! Want another go me laddie?” The old man was clearly in his element. “That’ll be another fiver if you don’t mind,” he said holding out his hand.

Ignoring the old man you flip open your communicator, “Karen, we are coming back to the ship, give us some directions to the landing bay. I’m not going back into that tube!”

The fine-tuning of the universe means there are a multitude of variables required to be within very small tolerances for matter to exist in the context of our universe. The fine-tuning of elements required for life requires another set of variables with extremely fine tolerances plus reverse entropy (flipping the second law of thermodynamics on its head) to produce the sort of information we see (like the genome). Just saying - “if we give it long enough, it will come about” - just doesn’t cut it.

Recap

At the beginning of this article I introduced you to my frustration over the idiocy of Darwinian evolution and the serious implications it has for the general population’s understanding of reality. Then I introduced you to the concept of genetic entropy - genes don’t get better over time, they degrade, in agreement with other physiological realities like the second law of thermodynamics (thus the name genetic entropy). We dug in a little deeper when considering mutations (mutations are bad and not the answer for evolution). Then we took a little break from genetics and went on a fanciful journey to the Universe-O-Matic to try to build our own life-sustaining universe, only to find we couldn’t even get off the starting block due to the incredible fine-tuning of our universe - if we can’t even get the basic environment to make a genome (without intelligent input), how in the universe can any of this be random?

Moving On

Now the point of this article is to canvas the multifaceted delusion that we are just machines in a mechanical world that just happened to come about by pure random chance (and there’s absolutely nothing spiritual to see here!). But I am afraid we may be running out of time to rehash these debates in this age of 5th generation warfare for your mind and soul on the natural plane and a desperate campaign for your soul on the spiritual plane. These debates on natural lines are important, most people are unaware of the overwhelming evidence AGAINST the status quo of today’s Godless materialism, but do we have the time and energy to continue to thrash it all out? I’m not sure we do. At least not in the way I’ve been taught at university with tedious detail and copious references.

Now I can easily lay out lots of impressive numbers, that few of us, including me, can even comprehend, that support the impossibility of Darwinian evolution. We can wax lyrical about the Haldane’s dilemma, Muller’s ratchet, cost of selection, or the nature of poly-functional poly-constrained DNA and the impossible complexity of layers of encrypted information in the genome and its irreducible complexity. But will this move you? Will you even read it? Most won’t. I don’t want to waste your time if there are more expedient things to discuss. And by expedient I mean things that may be more pragmatic, raw, with in-your-face relevance for the moment, actionable and simple (or simply less academically technical). In this spirit I point you to an article by Mark Bisone - The Great Unmasking - the sort of article that slaps you in your face then throws a cup of cold water into your already activated startle response. He quotes Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in an address to Medical Doctors for Covid Ethics International, pointing out the need to recognize the spiritual battle that gives volition, if not the very essence, of today’s troubles. Here’s the core of it…

I know that two centuries of Enlightenment thought, revolutions, atheistic materialism and anticlerical liberalism have accustomed us to thinking of Faith as a personal matter, or that there is not an objective Truth to which we all must conform. But this is the fruit of a propaedeutic indoctrination, one that happened long before what is happening today, and it would be foolish to believe that the anti-Christian ideology that drove the secret sects and Masonic groups of the eighteenth century had nothing to do with the anti-Christian ideology that today drives people like Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Bill Gates. The driving principles are the same: rebellion against God, hatred for the Church and humanity, and destructive fury aimed against Creation and especially against man because he is created in the image and likeness of God.

The pawns, Schawb, Soros, Gates, etc., are ultimately cogs in an antichrist movement preparing the way for the great “Man of Peace”, “Prince of this world”, otherwise known as Lucifer or Satan. But thanks to ‘enlightened’ thought and the ‘wisdom’ of the ‘scientifically’ informed modernity, this is silly superstition, right?

Mark asks a question to the enlightened gatekeepers of modern psychology and neuroscience who’s goal is to “produce healthier and happier minds”: How is your model working out so far? I know, as one of those psychology/neuro-informed professionals, that it’s not working out too well at all! Because we keep sidestepping the spiritual aspect of what’s going on.

Was I concerned with Mark’s lack of citations? Did I shun his offerings because he referred to us as ‘cats and kittens’, suggesting some sort of cognitive dysphoric psychopathology? Did I discount his work because he closed with Indiana Jones and how to pick out a nice mug? NO! Quite the opposite. Because people like Mark will throw a cup of cold water in your face and you’ll either appreciate the wake up call or just want to kill the bastard. (It’s a great piece by Mark and I’d encourage you to read it.)

Queen of Heaven

So in the spirit of The Great Unmasking I’d like to carry the conversation in the direction of a certain Ishtar (yes, a sudden paradigm shift!).

She’s an American Idol, powerful, ancient, massively popular, and she hates you to the core and would see you dead (after she’s corrupted you completely).

Ishtar has been known by many names - Venus, Aphrodite, Astarte, the Queen of Heaven. Like a shape-shifter she has been able to adapt to whatever environment, whatever culture, she finds herself in. Ishtar is a key part of the Strong Delusion. She’s been at it for eons. She is sexual revolution, she is the transgression of boundaries, conventions, and taboos. She takes what is forbidden and works it into mainstream culture, slowly, firstly with a slight shock, then comes familiarity, then tolerance, then acceptance, then celebration, then the new norm.

In Babylon she was the goddess of prostitutes - sex and eroticism was for her worship. Today she animates the sex industry, the porn industry, the mainstream acceptance of sex as a commodity, as a new normal, through every avenue of popular culture you can imagine.

And what is the strong delusion? That there is no moral standard for sexuality, there are no rules to be broken. Look at whatever you desire, express your sexuality however you like, there is no moral code. Even to the degree that pedophilia is not ‘wrong’ it’s just a preference.

In ancient Mesopotamia she declares herself “a woman and a man”, she merges opposites and confuses the sexes. In ancient Sumeria they sung that she could “turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man, to change one into the other”. She is the queen of trans. She is the emasculation and feminization of men. Her priests and ritual performers broke the traditions of gender - the men were feminized, the women masculinized. At her festivals men carried the feminine symbols of hoops while women carried swords, the cross-dressers, transvestites, nonbinary, androgynous, all paraded before her.

The people of Sumer parade before you.

The women adorn their right side with men’s clothing.

The people of Sumer parade before you…

The men adorn their left side with women’s clothing.

It was nothing short of a modern pride parade. And she’s back with a vengeance! Today her pride parades, pride months, and push for every sexual deviance to be celebrated, is nothing but a replay of her heady days in Mesopotamia where she was exalted as the goddess of all goddesses. She’s even kept the same pride month of June as she did thousands of years ago in the ancient Middle East.

But this ancient deity has remained behind a veil in modern times, yet still drawing on the power of the people under her spell. She is in many places of power and influence but it’s difficult to isolate her - you can’t present her as the prime suspect for cultural corruption, because she is a spirit. She uses human agents, they are the ones left holding the condemning weapon, but she is the mastermind behind the crime. There is no ‘scientific evidence’, you can’t ‘follow the science’ (whatever that means), but you can see her if you adopt a historical and spiritual perspective.

She works a strong delusion across cultures that appear to be ‘just’ the outworking of noble ideals expresses as liberty, freedom, justice, tolerance, harmony, equality, and so on. But she is a master deceiver. She is the inversion of those noble ideals. She is slavery, injustice, intolerance, and chaos. She knows the human condition better than any psychologist today and she knows how to use our humanity against us.

There is much more to say about Ishtar, and I will in other posts, along with her associates, Ba’al the master and Molech the destroyer.

Well I’m not sure how we got from genetic entropy to a demon goddess who wants you dead, but it’s all part of the strong delusion.

More on the machine model

The machine analogy has put us on a wrong scent . . . How long are we to persist in refusing to look sheer hard facts in the face, merely in the interests of a seventeenth-century analogy which by now may well have outgrown its usefulness? Sooner or later biology will have to take account of them if there is to be any theoretical biology.

—Joseph Henry Woodger

One of the great deceptions of the past few hundred years is that of the machine model of everything. The fallacy of the machine model when applied to the living world leads us away from reality to an easily manipulated abstraction of things. I think if we had more of a grasp of two fundamental principles, namely relationships and flow, we’d have a better time comprehending ourselves and the world. And when I say ‘relationships’ I’m not talking about romance or the relationship you have with your mother-in-law, although those things are part of the bigger picture. I’m talking about the ‘betweenness’ that forges relationship - like the relationship between the notes of a melody, or between firing neurones and a conscious thought, or between one heartbeat and the next. And when I say ‘flow’ it’s not only the notion of a ‘flow state’ but the dynamic and energetic dance of the material, the immaterial, within time.

If you are interested, and a paying subscriber, you can read my earlier take on this machine model topic here:

Are You A Machine?

In this post I’m going to take the lead of Daniel J. Nicholson from the University of Exeter in the UK who was an editor and contributor to the book Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. The book is a collection of essays by various academics covering the philosophy and science of perceiving and modelling biology. In chapter 7 of this work Nicholson writes Reconceptualizing the Organism From Complex Machine to Flowing Stream, a title that does not leave us guessing as to where he is going and I believe a direction we all need to pay attention to.

The radical shift in our conceptualisation of the nature of things, since the seventeenth century, has so transformed our collective mind that it is difficult to think of the world as anything but mechanical in essence. This would have been rather alien to the ancients but for us in the 21st Century it is a given - everything from the grand procession of the galaxies to life on earth, down to the subatomic world, works like a fine tuned machine.

Metaphors are powerful tools for grasping an understanding of things, and the machine metaphor has had such a spectacular run during our epoch of science that we have forgotten that it is a metaphor at all. The clockwork universe became for us, not a metaphor, but the way things really are. But it had not always been that way:

Many of the pivotal figures of early modern science and philosophy displayed a dismissive—if not downright hostile—attitude toward metaphors, denouncing them as illegitimate rhetorical devices that compromise the clarity and objectivity of rational discourse. Today such views are rare, as there is widespread recognition of the indispensable roles that metaphors play in scientific theory and practice. But out of the endless array of metaphors used in science, it is difficult to think of one that has been more dominant and has exerted a greater influence than the machine metaphor, which provided the basic theoretical foundation for mechanicist natural philosophy in both physics and biology. (Nicholson, 2018, p. 140)

In the world of physics the machine model could not hold up given the discovery of quantum mechanics, although the language still seems pervasive in the field. But for the most part the classic mechanistic metaphor had to be abandoned in the light of something very different in the quantum realm. But for some reason the biologists, except for a short spell in the 1920s, held onto the machine metaphor and actually reinvigorated it with an energetic neo-Darwinian view of living things. Nicholson calls this the machine conception of the organism (MCO), and sees it as the most pervasive metaphors in modern biology. I would have to agree with him and even suggest that the MCO has morphed from metaphor to a perception of reality!

The metaphor in our age has taken on a new level of complexity, flexibility, and adaptability, because of the invention of the computer. Now genes can be thought of as machine code, executing programs that develop an embryo into an adult, each component of which is akin to either the hardware of a computer or it’s software. The cell is a marvellous factory of specialised molecular machines producing proteins and chemicals, with its own power station and coded plans for its minute by minute output.

As natural as this metaphor seems to be to us, Nicholson argues that there are some fundamental differences between machines and living things that need to be re-appreciated to escape the mesmerising grip of the machine metaphor. Firstly living things are intrinsically purposive, their activities and internal operations are about their own maintenance of their own organisation. This is different to a machine that is extrinsically purposive, in that their workings fulfil the functional ends of an external agent. Secondly there is an argument from the perspective of thermodynamics that sheds light on other fundamental differences between machines and organisms.

The science of thermodynamics came about to understand the relationship between heat and work, and very early on in this exploration living things were conceived as heat engines. Antonie Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, characterised respiration as a form of combustion and conducted the first calorimetry experiments likening heat and carbon dioxide produced by an animal to an engine. His thinking went something like this: ‘The animal machine is governed by three main regulators: respiration, which consumes oxygen and carbon and provides heating power; perspiration, which increases or decreases according to whether a great deal of heat has to be transported or not; and finally digestion, which restores to the blood what it loses in breathing and perspiration’

The nineteenth century saw physiology develop along with thermodynamic theories and the two became intertwined with organisms being described as heat engines obeying the first law of thermodynamics - an idea that proved problematic the more we understood the nature of physiology, for example:

In combustion, the surmounting of the energy of activation—which is necessary for the accomplishment of oxidative reactions—is achieved by raising the temperature considerably, whereas in respiration this is not needed. Instead, respiration relies on the enzymatic lowering of the energy of activation. If the transformation of energy were to take place in organisms in the same way that it does in heat engines, then, at temperatures at which living systems can exist, the coefficient of their useful activity would fall to an insignificant fraction of 1 per cent. (Nicholson, 2018, p. 142 footnote)

Applying the second law of thermodynamic to organisms is even more problematic, especially to the theory of evolution. This law negates the possibility of perfect transformation of heat into work. Entropy is at play in this theory where energy to do work is decreasing and dissipated energy is increasing.

Every natural change, whether physical or chemical, exhibits this utterly irreversible tendency—pithily described by Arthur Eddington as the ‘arrow of time’—which results in a net, ever growing increase in disorder. Such an inexorable trend towards a uniform distribution of heat and the consequent ‘running down’ of the universe into a state of dead inertness is diametrically opposed to what we find in the living world, where there is a clear evolutionary tendency for complexity and organization to increase progressively with time. What are we to make of this paradoxical situation? (Nicholson, 2018, p. 143)

Now if you have been following this series you will know that I don’t subscribe to the idea of Darwinian evolution and that there is actually entropy at play in the generational progression of our genome. We started off way more ordered than we are now - the second law of thermodynamics holds true in regards to our degradation of our genetic integrity.

Nevertheless, this inconvenient concept of entropy threw a spanner in the works for the machine model of organisms until a work around was conceived. The response was that although overall entropy in the universe was increasing, at a local level, like the evolution of organisms, there could be an increase in order (negative entropy) as long as the net sum of order versus chaos was an increase in entropy. Schrödinger basically said that living things, to maintain their organised condition, feed on the free energy outside themselves, until they fall prey to the ultimate entropy, death, ushering in local thermodynamic equilibrium as it pertained to that poor soul.

To stay away from thermodynamic equilibrium (death) organisms need to constantly exchange energy and matter with their environment - they are open systems. Machines, however, exist in near equilibrium and do not have to constantly exchange energy and matter with their surroundings (to maintain static stability). Your motor vehicle sitting idle in your garage overnight is in a very different state of stability in the morning than you would be if you spent the night completely shut down (no respiration, no heartbeat, no brain activity, etc). Your vehicle would spark to life at the turn of the ignition switch. You, however, would be off to the morgue.

Organisms achieve a dynamic stability by maintaining a low-entropic steady state through continual use of free energy. And just like organisms, other open non-equilibrium system exist such as flames, whirlpools, tornadoes, etc. If they reach an equilibrium they cease to be. But the organism is the most fascinating open system due to the non-linear, self-organising nature of living things:

lya Prigogine, whose foundational work in establishing non-equilibrium thermodynamics earned him a Nobel Prize in 1977, referred to these open systems as dissipative structures. Perhaps the most significant achievement of this new field of physics has been to show how self-organization arises in nature—that is, to explain how the macroscopic patterns of order displayed by dissipative structures spontaneously emerge from non-linear interactions and become stabilized in far-from-equilibrium conditions through an ongoing flux of energy and matter Organisms, from this perspective, are the most stable and complexly differentiated dissipative structures in existence. (Nicholson, 2018, pp. 144-45)

Claude Bernard, had the notion that organisms maintain an internal state of consistency in contrast to whatever external disturbances are outside of the organism. This, in turn, led Walter Cannon to formulate his concept of homeostasis:

The highly developed living being is an open system having many relations to its surroundings . . . The coordinated physiological reactions which maintain most of the steady states in the body are so complex, and are so peculiar to the living organism, that it has been suggested . . . that a specific designation for these states be employed—homeostasis. (Cannon, 1929, p. 400, emphasis added)

And of course the process that maintains an organisms steady state away from equilibrium is metabolism - using large amounts of free energy to avoid entropy, and thus stay organised, dynamically stable and alive.

But what about an engine? Doesn’t it ‘metabolise’ fuel and appear to have a similar form of stability when running as does an organism?

The engine has a physical frame that remains fixed and the materials that run through it (fuel, air, water, oil) are decidedly separate from the frame. The frame serves to channel the material, house the explosion, and is moved by it. An organism, however, changes in a continuous flow of metabolic activity.

Organisms are constantly being reconstituted from the matter they import from their surroundings, and consequently it is impossible to maintain the distinction between food materials and bodily constituents. As Hans Jonas phrased it, in an organism ‘[t]he exchange of matter with the environment is not a peripheral activity engaged by a persistent core: it is the total mode of continuity (self-continuation) of the subject of life itself’. This is why the fuel–food analogy is so misleading, and why the stability of a machine—despite its apparent dynamicity—ultimately resides in an unchanging material structure. In machines there is a specific ‘inflow’ and a specific ‘outflow’. In organisms everything flows. (Nicholson, 2018, pp. 146)

And even when a machine does reconfigure itself to achieve a certain end (a ‘transformer’ vehicle/robot comes to mind) it does so under rigid, precise and predetermined cycles of operation and is reset to its original configuration to enable it to perform that function again. There is no genuine process of transformation, but for the organism there is a continuous modification of structure in response to the environment. Organisms can heal and adapt in the most flexible of ways, unlike the rigidity of a machine. One example that comes to mind is the case of genetic researchers removing genes from a frog that would give it sight. Once the genes are removed and you have a generation of blind frogs you’d expect every generation after that to be blind. But in an amazing feat of spontaneous recovery a few generations down the line, these frogs regained their genetic attribution of sight. This wasn’t evolution. There was something like a ‘memory’ within the whole of the genome about sight that was then reconstituted. There is a dynamic and plasticity of the organism that machines do not have. Yes we can program a certain amount of self-repair into a machine, but it is a far cry from truly adaptive self-maintenance.

Machines take part in various processes, whereas organisms are wholly the process.

The machine conception of the organism (MCO) has certainly dominated our view of living things since the seventeenth century but has not been the only metaphor to understand biology. Bertalanffy (1952) in his treatise Problems of Life: An Evaluation of Modern Biological and Scientific Though, appeals to the famous aphorism of Heraclitus that it is impossible to step into the same river twice because fresh water is forever flowing through it. The stream is always changing. Similarly, organisms have a processual nature that is ever changing, as Bertalanffy says, ‘living forms are not in being, they are happening; they are the expression of a perpetual stream of matter and energy which passes the organism and at the same time constitutes it’. He referred to this view as the stream of life conception (SLC).

So what does this SLC give us as opposed to the MCO?

The external form of a stream is stable only because of the constant flow of water molecules that enter into it and emerge out of it. The moment this flow is interrupted, the stream itself disappears, as its very existence depends on the steady movement of water passing through it. In the same way, the physical form of an organism is merely the visible expression of the constancy of catabolic and anabolic processes going on within it. Its persistence through time is entirely dependent on the extremely intricate balancing of these two opposing kinds of reactions. As metabolism proceeds, with the steady import of nutrients and export of wastes, not much remains at a later time of the matter that once composed the organism. The SLC thus embodies two essential and complementary aspects of organismic dynamics: the continuous exchange of matter that lies at the very heart of the concept of metabolism on the one hand, and the surprising stability of form that is maintained in spite of this material exchange on the other. (Nicholson & Dupré, 2018, pp.148-9)

This is a starkly different picture to that of the steady state system of a machine. A processual perspective, like that of a stream, is necessary to grasp the true nature of such thermodynamically open system in a state of continual flux. Another attempt at a metaphor for the living was by Georges Cuvier in 1817 who proposed the following:

Life then is a vortex, more or less rapid, more or less complicated, the direction of which is invariable, and which always carries along molecules of similar kinds, but into which individual molecules are continually entering, and from which they are continually departing; so that the form of a living body is more essential to it than its matter. As long as this motion subsists, the body in which it takes place is living—it lives. When it finally ceases, it dies.

This gives us a sense of the transient nature of what constitutes the organism yet while maintaining its form. Since I wrote the first part of this article about 4 days ago, 1.32 trillion cells have been replaced in my body, about 4% of me. My constitution is not the same as it was 4 days ago yet I maintain the same recognisable form (even, unfortunately, my weight has remained stable). In a years time the ‘stream’ of me will have almost completely changed, yet, bar a few more grey hairs, I’ll be basically the same form (unless I can also get rid of some fat cells along the way). It is both the form and the continual exchange of materials that makes the living, living. With form only and no metabolism, the body is dead. A motor vehicle can be turned off (‘dead’) and yet still keep its integrity as a motor vehicle - my dead body won’t retain its integrity (as any can attest who has worked with dead bodies). The SLC perspective, by the 20th century did have a number of voices:

Lawrence Henderson, for instance, argued that ‘[l]iving things preserve, or tend to preserve, an ideal form, while through them flows a steady stream of energy and matter which is ever changing’. John Scott Haldane also stressed the energetic and material flux taking place in the organism, declaring that ‘organic structure is nothing but a molecular stream’. Charles Sherrington, for his part, described the cell as ‘an eddy in a stream of energy’ and as ‘a stream of movement which has to fulfil a particular pattern in order to maintain itself’. (Nicholson & Dupré, p. 150)

But water was not the only metaphor that proved useful in describing living things. Fire, as a metaphor, was also helpful in illustrating the nature of energy exchange in relationship to stability of form. When a candle is lit the flame settles into a stable dynamic as long as it has the oxygen and wax supplied to continue the combustion. John Burton Sanderson Haldane said that ‘a man is as much more complicated that a flame as a grand opera is more complicated that a blast on a whistle. Nevertheless, the analogy is real… a flame is like an animal in that you cannot stop it, examine the parts, and start it again, like a machine. Change is part of its very being’ (Haldane, 1940, p. 57).

And indeed man is more complicated (and complex) than a flame - organism have a greater de tree of stability due to the fact that they can store energy and manage metabolic needs without a continual supply of external energy. There is also the fact that organisms have physical boundaries and a much greater degree of complexity in functionally differentiated internal workings with complex interactions that also regulate the intake, use, and output of energy.

However the MOC view of biology won the upper hand as research focused on molecular biology’s preoccupation with coding, replication and expression of genetic information - we were more like a computer than a flame, it seemed. But as we progressed in our knowledge there were still fundamental things the MOC could not grasp about the living. In A New Biology for a New Century, Carl Woese points the finger at the MCO as a major obstacle to further progress in biology. He offers the following:

If they are not machines, then what are organisms? A metaphor far more to my liking is this. Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow—patterns in an energy flow. A simple flow metaphor, of course, fails to capture much of what the organism is. None of our representations of [the] organism capture [sic] it in its entirety. But the flow metaphor does begin to show us the organism’s (and biology’s) essence. And it is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as (stable) complex, dynamic organization[s]. (Woese, 2004, p. 176)

Given that the SLC can more accurately characterise living systems, in terms of thermodynamics, than can the MOC, Nicholson offers 3 ontological lessons to illustrate what a non-MOC, processual conception of biology might look like. I’ll try to summarise as briefly as possible here:

1) Activity is a necessary condition for existence.

“Owing to their thermodynamic condition, organisms—like all other dissipative structures—can only exist insofar as they are able to maintain themselves in a steady state far from equilibrium, and this requires a constant expenditure of free energy. “

‘Being’ does not precede activity, but rather activity is part of being. As has been pointed out a number of times now, a machine can ‘be’ without being active and can move back and forth between being active and ‘off’, unlike organisms.

2) Persistence is grounded in the continuous self-maintenance of form.

Remember I’m going to consist of different material in a year’s time, I’m in continual flux, yet my form remains. In fact the flux is necessary, the ‘self-maintenance of form’ or I’ll be dead.

3) Order does not entail design.

“Machines exhibit a static organization, in the sense that their physical architecture—as well as the degrees of freedom of their parts—is fixed upon manufacture. Organisms, on the other hand, exhibit a dynamic organization in the sense that their form reflects a stabilized pattern of continuous material exchange with their environment.”

For the last part, I do not subscribe to the notion that organisms ordered nature has completely and spontaneously sprung out of disorder and therefore have had no order imposed upon them. I believe there is a Creator who created the order we see in biology and not a spontaneous evolutionary process. But I’ve been covering this in other posts.

The machine metaphor has proven irresistible to the biological sciences but falls short on the most fundamental levels. I think we can all benefit greatly from moving away from the machine model when it comes to living things and adopt a model that better represents resilient processes of dynamic systems in biology. Who knows, maybe this will free us up in other areas to not be so deterministic and reductionistic in our conceptualisations of other areas of life? Let’s leave the machine model for machines, and a more processual view for living things.

Conclusion

We did not evolve and we are not machines. These are delusions of men at best and doctrines of demons at worst. There is a spiritual reality to the fabric of our universe and a grand narrative that we’ve forgotten because we’ve been under a strong delusion.