Darwin's Black Box - Michael J. Behe and Intelligent Design

BTW, if any of you are interested, Dr. McCarthy is very accessible through email. I've had a little correspondence with him some years ago. Or if you'd like, let's catalogue all of the issues that we can think of with his theory and I'll send him an email with those myself.
 
No, really. These are just knee jerk reactions and not how science is done. Hybridisation is prevalent in nature, but the true extent of it and possibility of highly disparate organisms to interbreed is not studied enough, exactly because when someone mentions a hybrid, people always think of deformities and sterility. I just think that whole issue warrants investigation. Hybrid zone - Wikipedia

I dunno, it doesn't seem to me that McCarthy has done enough to attempt to prove his theory wrong. More of that has happened here than what I can find on his website.

Maybe it's not studied enough because there aren't too many examples in nature, if it were so prevalent then studying it wouldn't be so hard.

Also, as Aeneas has mentioned, if it were so easy and prevalent, farmers would have a field day and some jokes that I've heard would be true. Eg: A bloke got lost in a rural area and saw a farm house on a hill so decided to go ask for directions. As he was making his way up the long driveway, he looked out his window and saw a chook running beside the car and was amazed that it was keeping pace with the car. When he got to the farm house, he mentioned the chook to the farmer. The farmer says, 'Yeah, we bred them with four legs so that we could sell more drumsticks.' The visitor says 'Wow, what do they taste like?' The farmer replied 'We don't know, we can't catch them.'

Ok, let me try to put this in the simplest and quickest way I can.
Let's try with an hypothetical example. Say we had a dog and a donkey. A dog has 78 chromosomes (39 pairs) and the donkey 62 (31 pairs).
So the dog mounts the jenny and the jenny gives birth to this hybrid. And the hybrid is viable and it grows up. Now this hybrid is what is called heterozygous, meaning it has unpaired chromosomes. It has 39 chromosomes from its canine father and 31 from its equine (I guess that works for donkeys too) mother. Here's where the fun starts. This hybrid donkey-dog is going to start producing gametes. During meiosis, the chromosomes will be unpaired, alleles will not correspond and there will be utter chaos. Therefore, this process will be entirely unpredictable. During meiosis, a number of things might happen, such as fusing of chromosomes, splitting up of chromosomes, mutations of a multitude of genes, deletion and doubling of genes, you will get genes from the dog and donkey on the same chromosome doing god knows what. You could also get a diploid gamete with 35 pairs of chromosomes. This gamete could possibly be able to impregnate a donkey and thus create a triploid organism. The triploid organism could then be able to produce a haploid gamete of say 54 chromosomes and mate with another of its kind. Boom, you have a 54 pair diploid organism that can mate with its kind but is possibly highly sterile with donkeys and dogs and it has genes from both set into a completely novel karyotype that is reproductively stable. If you think this is just stories, all of these mechanisms have been documented and they happen all the time.
So from the perspective of the donkey, this new organism has many new genes courtesy of the dog, it has a completely different karyotype and is no longer able to reproduce with either the donkey or the dog. If this organism is able to survive within it's environment, you've got yourself a new "species"(species is a completely imaginary concept) with it's own completely novel characteristics and it all happened in only a few generations among only a few individuals, so finding the intermediate forms is near impossible in the fossil record.

That's fairly complex with a lot of steps that could go wrong. Also, for it to happen once would not be enough. It would need to happen at least twice, and produce viable offspring of opposite sex that could mate to start a species. So each time we add another step, the likelihood for this to be a natural mating decreases.

Secondly, the genitals of the opposite sexes of each species are matched in order for most accurate sperm delivery to guarantee that the sperm will remain viable to reach it's target. You just ain't going to get that with a dog over a donkey.

But back to the example of farmers, if there's a population of people who pay a lot of attention to the habits of animals it's farmers. Farmers have been breeding animals since before there were scientists to even start throwing around theories about animals. They selectively breed to enhance stock within a species - and more recently they are probably the largest population of users of artificial insemination. If, as you say, hybridisation is prevalent in nature and there were examples around for farmers to observe, then they'd either be collecting or buying semen and artificially inseminating their stock with other species in attempts to improve their stock or create oddities for other means of income or to attempt to set trends in eating habits. Rare meats sell at premium prices.

Generally, if you know that a form is a hybrid and you know one of the parent forms, the way to find out the other parent form is to compare characteristics of the hybrid with the know parent form. All of the differences between them should be similarities with the other parent form.
So with a platypus you have a clear mixture of duck and beaver characteristics. If you assume it is some sort of duck hybrid, and work through the differences between a duck and the platypus, you will find that all of those differences are characteristics of a beaver.
And if a hybrid between a bird and a mammal is possible, anything is possible.

I mentioned the platypus in jest. That was a mistake because we don't know that a platypus is a hybrid.

Just because it has some characteristics in common with two different species, that's not enough to be able to assert it's a hybrid created by an interspecies mating in nature. The complexities of the genitalia of either the male or female duck would make it impossible for them to mate cross species in nature - even two thirds of male ducks find it difficult to inseminate a female duck - and thats before all of the things that would have to happen at the cellular level to establish viable offspring.

I think the timing of this subject emerging is kind of curious. I'm suspicious that it's connected to stories about creating human-animal hybrids for, as they claim, medical purposes and wonder if there isn't more going on with that. Time will tell.
 
Thanks Revolucionar, thanks to your effort to defend your position. I have, we have learned a lot.

On this subject, we are like the Salmon fish, swimming against the current in the river.

On the other hand, with all due respect, at times it has been a lot of fun. I have really had a good time.

That said, great learning. :-)
 
There is this article of Laurent Guyénot ( From Yahweh to Zion by Laurent Guyénot and The New History of Mankind: Who Are we? What are we? How did we get here?) that worth a visit:

Genealogy of Darwinism

What is Darwinism?
Karl Marx, after first sharing the enthusiasm of his friend Friedrich Engels for The Origin of Species (1859), finding there "the historical-natural basis of our conception", changed his mind by recognizing that Darwin projected in the animal and vegetable kingdom "his own English society".

Darwin's theory, he then wrote to Engels, was merely "the pure and simple transposition, from the social domain into the living nature, of the doctrine of Hobbes: bellum omnium contra omnes[the war of all against all], and of the thesis of competition dear to bourgeois economists, associated with the Malthusian population theory". [1]

In other words, Darwin is the spiritual offspring of Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith (liberalism theorist) and Thomas Malthus. Marx was right. Let us look at this genealogy.


Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes, author of the famous Leviathan (1651), is a revolutionary political theorist, who breaks with the Aristotelian tradition honoured by Thomas Aquinas, according to which man is a naturally political being. For Hobbes, man is sociable not by nature, but by necessity:

"Men have no pleasure (but on the contrary, a lot of displeasure) in being together where there is no power to dominate them all through fear. »

Driven mainly by the instinct of self-preservation and living in the constant anguish of violent death, "man is a wolf for man" in the state of nature, and human relations can be summed up as "the war of all against all". To avoid extinction, humanity invents the social order, which is a contract between individuals by which each transfers its natural rights to a Sovereign. Hobbes is the first theorist of the "social contract", and will be the major reference of all political philosophers after him, until today.

Leo Strauss, for example, a neoconservative master of thought, is a specialist in Hobbes. He defended the thesis that Hobbes had been influenced by Machiavelli (1469-1527), and evidence of this influence has recently been found in unpublished writings by Hobbes[2]. What Machiavelli wrote in half words, Hobbes can write more openly a century and a half later. Machiavelli, for example, indicated in a roundabout way that he did not believe in the immortality of the soul. Hobbes, on the other hand, clearly displays his ontological materialism:

"The universe is corporeal; all that is real is material, and all that is not material is not real. »

Hobbes is therefore considered to be the founder of modern materialism. But Hobbes was the product of his time. His work and success are set in the particular context of Cromwell's Puritan England. The latter, after having signed in 1649 the death warrant of King Charles I (the act is written by a certain Isaac Dorislaus), instituted himself Lord Protector of the ephemeral Commonwealth, from 1653 until his death in 1658. Cromwell was a bloody tyrant for Catholics, and the author of a genocidal campaign against the Irish, but he was a great friend of the Jews who, from Holland, orchestrated Calvinist propaganda and financed the revolutionary army (in particular the extremely wealthy Fernandez Carvajal, who also made his network of spies available to Cromwell). Under royalty, Jews were still officially banned from the Kingdom (since 1290), but many Portuguese or Venetian marranes had settled in London under the Calvinist mask. A campaign led by the Dutch Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel (Portuguese marrane returned to Judaism), near Cromwell, contributed to the de facto lifting of the ban. Under Calvinist influence, Judaism even enjoyed such prestige that authors competed with each other in inventiveness to prove that the English themselves, the new chosen people, were the direct descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. This theory originated in The Rights of the Kingdom (1646), a plea for regicide written by John Sadler, personal secretary of Oliver Cromwell, a Hebrew and friend of Menasseh Ben Israel.

Materialism has always been part of Judaism, for it is firmly written in the Hebrew Bible, which explicitly denies the existence of an individual immortal soul: man is dust and returns to dust (Genesis 3:19). Over the centuries, this materialism has been tempered by external influences (Hellenistic and then Christian), but has never been totally abandoned by the intellectual elite. Moreover, it has become widely popular in the Marranean circles, especially since they, through Calvinism, have emancipated themselves from talmudism and returned to the source of the Old Testament. If then Hobbes' materialism may seem revolutionary - and incompatible with monotheism - in the Christian world, it is not in any way revolutionary in the same way.

Hobbes is a Calvinist puritan, but his religious ideas are so typically Jewish that his Marian origin has been hypothesized (as assumed by Machiavelli, whose neoconservative Michael Ledeen writes: "Listen to his political philosophy and you will hear Jewish music")[3]. For example, Hobbes reduces Christian faith to the assertion that "Jesus is the Messiah", and defends a political vision of the Messiah that owes everything to the Old Testament. For Hobbes, "the Kingdom of God was first instituted by Moses' ministry over the Jews", because at that time, "God alone is king"[4].

Whether from a crypto-Jewish background or not, it is undeniable that the success of Hobbes owes much to the influence of Jews and Marranos in England and the cultural climate they spread there. Hobbes is only the most visible leader of a current of thought that penetrates Christianity as a foreign body and promotes a complex of anthropological, sociological and political ideas that will reach maturity in Victorian times and shine throughout the West to found modernity.


Mandeville and Smith
Adam Smith, author of the famous The Wealth of the Nations (1776), is a student of Hobbes, but instead of the latter's "Sovereign", he substitutes the "Market". Postulating as Hobbes that human beings are motivated exclusively by their own profit, he nevertheless bets that, in a society of free competition, the sum of individual selfishness is enough to create a just society:

"Each individual... seeks only his own profit, and in this, as in many other cases, he is moved by an invisible hand to promote an end that was not part of his intention. »


This Invisible Hand is, in reality, that of a plutocracy reigning over a world totally subjected to the commercial spirit.

The missing link between Hobbes and Smith is Bernard Mandeville, a political philosopher born to Huguenot parents who had taken refuge in Holland and settled in London in 1693. Most certainly influenced by Dutch Marranean circles, and perhaps in reality of Marrane ancestry, he published in 1714 in English The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, aimed at proving that :

"The defects of men in depraved humanity can be used to the advantage of civil society, and that they can be given the place of moral virtues. »


Private vices contribute to the public good while altruistic actions can actually harm it. For example, a libertine acts by vice, but "his prodigality gives work to tailors, servants, perfumers, cooks and women of bad life, who in turn employ bakers, carpenters, etc.". ». On the contrary, morality is of no social use, and even harmful to collective prosperity, since it condemns luxury: a society cannot have both morality and prosperity at the same time. This political theory is based on an anthropological theory that postulates in man a passion for the admiration of others, which Mandeville calls self-liking, self-esteem. Self-esteem" is expressed in the display of elegant and well-dressed clothes, crews, furniture, expensive buildings, everything that men can acquire to be valued by others. "It is therefore the driving force behind the luxury economy. But, says Mandeville, this luxury economy based on self-esteem only concerns consumers. Production must be ensured by an industrious class maintained in an economy of need, i.e. in a state of destitution forcing them to work for a living.

The happy society according to Mandeville is the one that allows a class to live in pleasure and idleness, thanks to the work of the poor: an opinion that Voltaire shared. Rousseau, on the other hand, whose vision of man was like the antidote to that of Hobbes, devoted several writings to criticizing the Mandeville system, which inspired a deep disgust in him and whose disastrous consequences he saw. [5]


Malthus, Spencer and Darwin
Shortly after Smith, Thomas Malthus appeared in the same ideological lineage. His famous law, set out in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), postulates that any period of prosperity creates an exponential increase in population which, if not stopped, eventually exceeds the capacity to produce food, leading to famine, war and excess mortality.

Malthus therefore opposes social protection laws, because "these laws create the poor they assist". Therefore: "If a man cannot feed his children, they must starve. »

Malthusianism, which adapted well to the Victorian mental climate, inspired Herbert Spencer at the end of the 19th century, who formulated the natural law of "survival of the fittest" in Progress, its Laws and Causes (1857). Spencer in turn denounces socialist initiatives aimed at protecting weak individuals from the harsh laws of natural selection.

Darwin himself admits in his book that his theory is only "the doctrine of Malthus applied to the animal and vegetable kingdom, acting with all its power". It should be recalled that Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution, i.e. a genealogical relationship between animal species, but simply proposed a Malthusian explanation, based on natural selection by adapting it to the state of natural resources. For Malthus, this mechanism applies within the same species, in this case the human species. But Darwin posits the bold and forever unverifiable hypothesis that natural selection is also responsible for the appearance of new species (a species being defined as a group of individuals capable of reproducing among themselves, but not with individuals of another species). Darwin is also influenced by Spencer. Spencer's theory is now stigmatized as an abusive misuse of Charles Darwin's biological theory, and is referred to as "social Darwinism". But Spencer's book was published two years before Darwin's on The Origin of Species (1859). It was actually Spencer who prepared the scene for Darwin, and it is Darwinism that should be referred to as "biological spencerism".

Darwin's success is not due to his intrinsic scientific merits, and it was not the naturalists who welcomed him. Darwin was especially well received by the Victorian bourgeoisie because he brought to the spencerian theory and dominant political ideology a support from the hard sciences.

In Darwin's wake came his cousin Francis Galton, anthropologist and statistician, author of Hereditary Genius, its laws and consequences (1862), inventor of "eugenics", whose purpose is to correct the perverse effect of civilization. This, regrettably, "reduces the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection and preserves the weak lives that would have perished in barbaric lands". Therefore, Spencer's laissez-faire approach is not enough; the state must intervene, not to help the weak, but to prevent them from reproducing. And it was Leonard Darwin, Charles' son, who led the fight as President of the British Eugenics Society from 1911 to 1928.

It should be noted that the paradigm that was being put in place at that time went beyond the right-left divide; Spencer's "laissez-faire" approach was rather liberal, while Galton's eugenics, which valued state interventionism, was historically leftist[6]. But the second is basically only a sophistication of the first; it claims to support the "survival of the most fit" by sterilizing the least fit. The Darwinian paradigm can therefore be placed at the service of a state obsessed with racial purity, as Hitler's Germany will be, as well as at the service of commercial liberalism, as in England and the United States.

In the final analysis, Darwin's anthropology, implicit in The Origin of Species and explicit in The Descent of Man and Natural Selection (1871), is indeed the heir to that of Hobbes, because Darwin has only made literal what was still only a metaphor in Hobbes: man is a beast. Not only does civilized man descend from the savage (Hobbes), but the savage himself descends from the monkey (Darwin).

In his second book, Darwin provides a cold justification for colonialism and the Amerindian genocide, writing:

"In a future period, not so distant and measurable in terms of centuries, man's civilized races will certainly exterminate and replace the wild races throughout the world. » [7]

Darwin says nothing more than what had been said before him, but he brings to this idea the stamp of naturalistic science, and above all, by connecting it to his theory of the origin of species, he implicitly places this genocidal process in the continuity of a positive evolution that has already produced wild man from the monkey.

Jewish Congress
Darwin also wrote in The Descent of Man:

"If a tribe has many members who possess a high degree of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, and are therefore always ready to help each other and sacrifice themselves for the common good, it must obviously prevail over most other tribes, and this is what natural selection is all about. » [8]

It is easy to understand the favourable reception of this idea among the British Jewish elite, who hold a firm conviction in the superiority of the Jewish people, and who therefore find in the Darwinian Selection a new interpretation of the Divine Election. No one embodied this disposition of spirit better than Benjamin Disraeli, future British Prime Minister, friend of Baron Lionel de Rothschild and precursor of Zionism. Hannah Arendt describes Disraeli as a "race fanatic" who, in his writings, "traced the plan of a Jewish empire, in which the Jews would be the governing class, strictly separated". [9]

Seven years before The Origin of Species, Disraeli wrote:

"It is futile for man to attempt to thwart the inexorable law of nature that decreed that a superior race could never be destroyed or absorbed by an inferior race. » [10]

The Darwinian paradigm has a strong resonance in the Jewish mentality, and many Jewish thinkers stand out among Spencer's, Darwin's and Galton's most enthusiastic disciples. Lucien Wolf, editor-in-chief of the Jewish World, but also politician and historian, was one of the first to develop a "Darwinian" theory of the racial superiority of Jews. He wrote in 1884, in an article entitled What is Judaism? A Question of To-Day:

"I believe that the importance of the superiority of the Jews lies precisely in the fact that it is almost a degree in evolution. »

This superiority would be the happy result of "the rigid observance for long centuries of a "particular" legalism by a particularly exclusive people", by which he mainly means strict endogamy:

"Jewish separatism, or "tribalism" as it is now called, was invented to enable Jews to preserve without stain for the benefit of humanity not only the teachings of Judaism but also their physical results as illustrations of their value. » [11]

In relation to endogamy, the Jewish valorization of intellectual work, which ensures a strong competitiveness of rabbis on the matrimonial market, is often invoked as a Darwinian explanation of the superior intelligence of Jews: thus, in the Middle Ages, the most successful spirits made themselves clean monks if they were Christians, but obtained the wives of choice and a large descent if they were Jews. [12]

Joseph Jacobs, who worked with Francis Galton, emphasized the competitive relationship between races. His Studies in Jewish Statistics, Social, Vital and Anthropometrical (1891) states

"In the case of Jews, persecution, when it was not too harsh, probably helped to bring out their best potential. ...] Eventually the weakest members of each generation were eliminated by persecution that tempted or forced them to embrace Christianity, and so contemporary Jews are the survivors of a long process of unnatural selection that apparently excellently adapted them to the struggle for intellectual existence. » [13]

This positive reversal of persecution as a spenseric mechanism ensuring the "survival of the fittest" by expelling "soft" Jews from the gene pool is a commonplace among community Jews. Theodor Herzl evokes it as if it were a matter of course:

"This hatred of Jews will never have caused anything but the defection of the weakest among us. The strongest Jews proudly return to their people when persecution breaks out. »

As Claude Klein points out in his translation of The State of the Jews, it is in the same logic that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974-1977) described Jews leaving Israel as "falling waste"[14]. As for the importance of endogamy for the preservation of the Jewish race, it was summarized by Golda Meir in these terms:

"Marrying a non-Jew is like joining the six million[exterminated Jews]? » [15]

Laurent Guyénot

And lucky french readers HERE the original article.
 
I dunno, it doesn't seem to me that McCarthy has done enough to attempt to prove his theory wrong. More of that has happened here than what I can find on his website.

Maybe it's not studied enough because there aren't too many examples in nature, if it were so prevalent then studying it wouldn't be so hard.

Also, as Aeneas has mentioned, if it were so easy and prevalent, farmers would have a field day and some jokes that I've heard would be true. Eg: A bloke got lost in a rural area and saw a farm house on a hill so decided to go ask for directions. As he was making his way up the long driveway, he looked out his window and saw a chook running beside the car and was amazed that it was keeping pace with the car. When he got to the farm house, he mentioned the chook to the farmer. The farmer says, 'Yeah, we bred them with four legs so that we could sell more drumsticks.' The visitor says 'Wow, what do they taste like?' The farmer replied 'We don't know, we can't catch them.'



That's fairly complex with a lot of steps that could go wrong. Also, for it to happen once would not be enough. It would need to happen at least twice, and produce viable offspring of opposite sex that could mate to start a species. So each time we add another step, the likelihood for this to be a natural mating decreases.

Secondly, the genitals of the opposite sexes of each species are matched in order for most accurate sperm delivery to guarantee that the sperm will remain viable to reach it's target. You just ain't going to get that with a dog over a donkey.

But back to the example of farmers, if there's a population of people who pay a lot of attention to the habits of animals it's farmers. Farmers have been breeding animals since before there were scientists to even start throwing around theories about animals. They selectively breed to enhance stock within a species - and more recently they are probably the largest population of users of artificial insemination. If, as you say, hybridisation is prevalent in nature and there were examples around for farmers to observe, then they'd either be collecting or buying semen and artificially inseminating their stock with other species in attempts to improve their stock or create oddities for other means of income or to attempt to set trends in eating habits. Rare meats sell at premium prices.



I mentioned the platypus in jest. That was a mistake because we don't know that a platypus is a hybrid.

Just because it has some characteristics in common with two different species, that's not enough to be able to assert it's a hybrid created by an interspecies mating in nature. The complexities of the genitalia of either the male or female duck would make it impossible for them to mate cross species in nature - even two thirds of male ducks find it difficult to inseminate a female duck - and thats before all of the things that would have to happen at the cellular level to establish viable offspring.

I think the timing of this subject emerging is kind of curious. I'm suspicious that it's connected to stories about creating human-animal hybrids for, as they claim, medical purposes and wonder if there isn't more going on with that. Time will tell.
This doesn't mean that someone didn't tamper with them. This hybrid business could just be a 3D mechanism used by the designers.
 
Thanks for the video luc! I enjoyed seeing those varying points of view on Darwin expressed well. They're very funny guys too! Sometimes we forget the people who do the research and write the books are human beings.
 
Stephen Meyer is definitely the sharpest knife in that drawer, though I do like Berlinski.

I also looked up Gelernter and learned that he lost his right hand and eye because he was a recipient of a package from the "Unabomber." I wonder why he was targeted?
 
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Stephen Meyer is definitely the sharpest knife in that drawer, though I do like Berlinski.

I also looked up Gelernter and learned that he lost his right hand and eye because he was a recipient of a package from the "Unabomber." I wonder why he was targeted?
I couldn't find anything specific, just that the unabomber was anti-technology and Gelernter worked with computers - plus an account that said Kaczynski wasn't that methodical with picking his targets. This wiki page says "David Gelernter may have been bombed to victimize his brother, Yale genetics researcher Joel Gelernter."
 
Stephen Meyer is definitely the sharpest knife in that drawer, though I do like Berlinski.

I also looked up Gelernter and learned that he lost his right hand and eye because he was a recipient of a package from the "Unabomber." I wonder why he was targeted?
He might have been targeted, considering that the person who sent the bomb, Kaczynski, would be an ideal candidate to mess with. Or was it just chaos and experimenting? The story about the Unabomber was according to the Wiki: Ted Kaczynski - Wikipedia
Theodore John Kaczynski
(/kəˈzɪnski/; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber (/ˈjuːnəbɒmər/), is an American domestic terrorist, former mathematics professor, and anarchist author.[2][3][4] He was a mathematics prodigy,[5] but he abandoned an academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, he killed three people and injured 23 others in an attempt to start a revolution by conducting a nationwide bombing campaign targeting people involved with modern technology. In conjunction, he issued a social critique opposing industrialization while advocating a nature-centered form of anarchism.[6]

In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He witnessed the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin and concluded that living in nature was untenable; he began his bombing campaign in 1978.
[...]
Psychological study[edit]
As a sophomore, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment" led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student, and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were turned over to an anonymous attorney, who in a later session would confront and belittle the subject – making "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks – using the content of the essays as ammunition, while electrodes monitored the subject's physiological reactions. These encounters were filmed, and subjects' expressions of anger and rage were later played back to them repeatedly.[25] The experiment lasted three years, with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Kaczynski each week.[26][27] Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.[28]

Kaczynski's lawyers later attributed his hostility towards mind control techniques to his participation in Murray's study.[25]Some sources have suggested that Murray's experiments were part of Project MKUltra, the Central Intelligence Agency's research into mind control.[29][30][31] Chase[32][33] and others[34][35] have also suggested that this experience may have motivated Kaczynski's criminal activities.
There is much more in the biography, but the above gives an idea.
 
He might have been targeted, considering that the person who sent the bomb, Kaczynski, would be an ideal candidate to mess with. Or was it just chaos and experimenting? The story about the Unabomber was according to the Wiki: Ted Kaczynski - Wikipedia

[...]
There is much more in the biography, but the above gives an idea.
Yeah, Kaczynski himself might not have been aware the significance of his targets, if he was mind-controlled. It's interesting that there isn't much out there on the reasons for targeting certain individuals. I wonder if any of the alternative researchers have any hypotheses about why the victims were targeted specifically - or if it was just an 'experiment in chaos'...
 
Yeah, Kaczynski himself might not have been aware the significance of his targets, if he was mind-controlled. It's interesting that there isn't much out there on the reasons for targeting certain individuals. I wonder if any of the alternative researchers have any hypotheses about why the victims were targeted specifically - or if it was just an 'experiment in chaos'...
We are getting into a disturbing territory; along the way I found an article about how he was caught. Basically it was his sister in-law, a professor of philosophy, who recognized the similarity between letters received from her husband's brother and the article that Kaczynski had asked the big newspapers to publish. One might ask oneself if there are any sleepers who if activated are programmed to kill prominent or at least important scientists including some of the ones that have made a name for themselves by writing and publishing texts about evolution. By promoting their articles, we perhaps help to give them more weight so that they either do not disappear or do not disappear without being noticed. I don't know if there is a thread about scientists that went missing or died under strange circumstances. Even if just taking the transcripts, several instances come to mind.
 
Thank you for the recommendation. While waiting for the book to arrive I watched this little documentary.
It adds some background to the public debate about intelligent design.

Thank you that video was so interesting and easy to understand I am ordering the book. I was convinced this topic would be way over my head but I think maybe I can get it after all
 
Thank you that video was so interesting and easy to understand I am ordering the book. I was convinced this topic would be way over my head but I think maybe I can get it after all

There really isn't much difficult here. Especially Behe's books are easily understandable to anyone. Whenever he goes into biological details, it's just to give you the impression of the complexity, so that you get it's too complicated to just happen accidentally, but you don't really need to understand any of the details. Basically you just need to get that the cell is more complex than a computer, and thus the idea that it could build itself is retarded. The general explanations are very clear.

In fact, I would say it's all pretty simple. Evolution is just ridiculous nonsense. The only difficulty is in overcoming the programming and brainwashing. Once you get over that, it all seems plain as day. You start wondering how the hell could anybody have believed it ever.

When I started reading these books, I pretty much didn't know anything about the topic. I don't think I had even heard of random mutations before this. I did a lot of research of my own later, outside the books, because I became really fascinated with it, so I studied DNA and proteins and ribosomes and so on, but none of that is necessary in order to get the point. I mostly did that because I really wanted to be able to explain it to others. All the books I've read so far have been easy to understand.

And if there's something you don't get, you can always ask here.
 
There really isn't much difficult here. Especially Behe's books are easily understandable to anyone. Whenever he goes into biological details, it's just to give you the impression of the complexity, so that you get it's too complicated to just happen accidentally, but you don't really need to understand any of the details. Basically you just need to get that the cell is more complex than a computer, and thus the idea that it could build itself is retarded. The general explanations are very clear.

Exactly. Unless you are a biologist or geneticist, I don't know why you would care too much about understanding all the details.

In fact, I would say it's all pretty simple. Evolution is just ridiculous nonsense. The only difficulty is in overcoming the programming and brainwashing. Once you get over that, it all seems plain as day. You start wondering how the hell could anybody have believed it ever.

It's so ridiculous. It's almost hard for me not to have at least some contempt for those who believe it. Those who believe it don't understand the details of the theory. It's the old; someone with supposed credentials says it's real science (i.e. the white lab coat effect) so it must be true.
That's a big factor of why the human race is such a mess. Too many people don't grasp that they need to take personal responsibility and question everything. Really think for themselves. Don't take anything at face value, especially atheism. The atheist make fools of themselves prancing around like peacocks because they figured out the bible can't be taken literally! Really? Wow, I never thought of that! If I could just learn how to be a 'free thinker.' Free, apparently, just so long as I take any scientific dogma as incontrovertible fact. Because science (duh)!

Don't get me started...
 
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