You’ve not been able to miss the Marvel universe, I’m betting, even if, like regular readers, you don’t go to the movies. The characters are nevertheless everywhere, as is the influence of the cartoonish thinking of their movies.
They have this thing in the Marvel world called “mutants”, which are a group of teens and twenty-somethings (the older ones all die early?) who are born with astounding powers. Like laser beam eyes, or running real fast. One character disappears in a puff of blue smoke and reappears elsewhere (never, luckily, inside solid objects). I think one of them can make it rain.
The shtick is to pretend all these fascinating teens with enviable superpowers are beleaguered, and suffer from mutantism. Poor creatures! Teased everywhere they go, yet they can destroy ordinary people with a flick of their brightly colored tails. Or whatever.
That metaphor and what is happening to our culture is so obvious, we’ll pass it by quickly. Let’s instead focus on the less obvious one, which is to explain how these non-human mutants come into existence.
I don’t know how their writers explain it, but it’s probably some quirk of genetics or the like. Whatever the explanation is, somehow ordinary superpowerless parents give birth to mutant superpowered children who are no longer (as some say) subject to the same laws of physics as the rest of us.
Laser beam eyes and other such curiosities should cost massive amounts of energy, which mutants have in infinite quantity. They get it free, in endless supply, and in ways impossible for man. If there’s one truth of physics that is indisputable, it’s that perpetual-motion machines are impossible. Yet mutants, in effect, have them built inside themselves.
Zap! Pow! Wham! forever without tiring. Or maybe that’s Batman.
Anyway, I believe you have the idea. Now let’s see how this is a metaphor for a certain class of thinker.
Evolution, some say, proceeds by fitness. It produces, not always at once, but always in the end, creatures that are fitter than their predecessors. Some claim to have quantified this, and propose various models which fit well to their choice of data.
Let’s take as example the peer-reviewed paper “Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception” by Chetan Prakash, Kyle D. Stephens and Donald D. Hoffman in Acta Biotheoretica. Here is their Abstract (my paragraphification):
Does natural selection favor veridical percepts—those that accurately (if not exhaustively) depict objective reality? Perceptual and cognitive scientists standardly claim that it does. Here we formalize this claim using the tools of evolutionary game theory and Bayesian decision theory. We state and prove the “Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem” which shows that the claim is false: If one starts with the assumption that perception involves inference to states of the objective world, then the FBT Theorem shows that a strategy that simply seeks to maximize expected-fitness payoff, with no attempt to estimate the “true” world state, does consistently better.
More precisely, the FBT Theorem provides a quantitative measure of the extent to which the fitness-only strategy dominates the truth strategy, and of how this dominance increases with the size of the perceptual space. The FBT Theorem supports the Interface Theory of Perception (e.g. Hoffman, Singh & Prakash, 2015), which proposes that our perceptual systems have evolved to provide a species-specific interface to guide adaptive behavior, and not to provide a veridical representation of objective reality.
That’s a lot of jargon, so let me paraphrase: “We,” say the authors, “Prove, using truth, that truth cannot be known: Our theory that the truth cannot be known is true: here is a model which we believe is true that shows evolution does not lead to truth.”
Since you and I, dear reader, are the products of evolution, we cannot know whether or not our authors’ theory is true. Evolution may have produced in us a mere desire to say the theory is true, because this enhances our ability to survive on stale cookies and cold coffee, of the kind served at computer science departmental seminars.
Yet our authors Prakash, Stephens, and Hoffman can see the truth which we cannot!
They are therefore mutants.
They, by some mechanism unknown to us low brutish fitness-over-truth seeing mundanes, have escaped the clutches of evolution, and with laser-like perception, like the Marvel mutant’s laser beam eyes, can see what is impossible for us to see.
This is an astonishing superpower.
Doubtless they will claim victimhood over our teasing, like in our first metaphor. But this, too, is in their favor, for there is no higher being in our culture than the Victim.
Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank.
Adam was the most intelligent man ever existing and it has been downhill ever since and that truth is the exact opposite of the putative truth of evolution which is the consensus of experts.
Where is the science that two animals fornicated and produced an offspring with one or more organs neither parent possessed?
I don’t know how their writers explain it, but it’s probably some quirk of genetics or the like.
Yes … it might even be epochal
At least for the Spiderman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and “The Joker”, there were environmental factors.
Individual cells are conglomerates, that is to say, cities of smaller microorganisms (organelles), all working in concert, all dividing and reproducing simultaneously to produce a new, whole cell. Science can’t even explain how that came about, because any individual failure dooms the organism as a whole. It all works, or none of it does. That cannot be done by individual, gradual mutation.
Where is the science that two animals fornicated and produced an offspring with one or more organs neither parent possessed?
o Mediterranean wall lizards.
Carnivorous lizards on a Dalmatian island devoid of vegetation were transplanted to one lush with veggies. Twenty years later, their descendants were vegetarians and had developed a new digestive organ to process the plant matter.
There is no mystery from an Aristotelian perspective. The novel feature existed in potentia as Augustine wrote* and was actualized. As for example, the word “cut” exists in potentia in the word “cat,” requiring only the linguistic mutation a->u to be actualized.
Aquinas commented on this:
Everyone forgets about final causes. The organism participates in its own fitness. Whether a long beak or a short beak makes a finch more fit depends on what the finch is trying to do. Mutations are only the material cause of evolution. Maintenance of type is the formal cause and natural selection is the efficient cause.
YOS,
For no reason I can fathom, WordPress put your comment directly into the Trash.
As best I could tell from looking at the paper, it was some sort of simulation where a strategy labeled “truth” was beaten out by a strategy labeled “fitness”. Extending that to a naive reading of the headline is rather a large leap. But this criticism is rendered silly by the larger contradiction our host has pointed out.
Leo,
Not only that, but these authors did not understand that the models they built, with their very own hands, only did what they were told to do.
It’s always hilarious when this happens.
“I think one of them can make it rain.”
That’s the only one of these things I’ve watched. I think it starred Burt Lancaster.
They seem to have run out of truly impressive superpowers, such as flying, extraordinary strength, x-ray vision, etc. I think I’ve seen advertisements with a super woman of some kind, played by the voluptuous Scarlett Johansson, whose powers consist of wearing tight, shiny coveralls and sporting a pair of .45 ACPs.
In this age of lowered superhero expectations, as the owner of an old house and an old truck, my superpowers of choice would be the ability to stop all types of leaks. Also, to prune trees with my mind.
Cary,
I would like to be able to turn on and off deafness. Especially in public venues, and most especially when any modern music is being played.
1 – I once earned four red stripes on a black belt in Karate and so, much to amusement and chagrin of my wife, laughed myself silly at the Teenage Mutant Turtles. These were not superheros, every episode mocked superheros, and no one I knew then or now ever took them as anything but silly entertainment.
2 – stuff like superman and batman, however, I believe I’ve always thought, are both homo-erotic and unintentionally subversive of the american experience. Basically these appeal to people unable to make the jump from parental dependence (the superhero will always appear in the nick of time to save me..) to adult independence and personal responsibility.
3 – as for that paper – perhaps if it were printed on tissue, cut into 4″ wide strips, and rolled it would truly acheive fitness to purpose?
By Design: Behe, Lennox, and Meyer on the Evidence for a Creator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXexaVsvhCM
All of these fictional superpowers are eclipsed by the very real world
examples of mental creations like the hydrogen bomb.
Fact Check:
As is usual with evolutionist enthusiasm to declare a spade a dog, assumptions, dogmatically assumed, are written into the interpretive model so that anything can be dscribed within the flavour of the paradigm.
Living creatures are designed by God to be adaptive. In every case of an evolutionist wetting themselves with glee over some new “organ” or “trait” “discovery”, the genetic material was always present and built in from the start. Just add in exaggerative language and, hey presto, THE SCIENCE ™!
“The most intriguing discovery is the allegedly “completely new gut structure” of the lizards. According to the article, the original lizards were “not built to digest a vegetarian diet,” while the island they were transplanted to is filled with plants.
But the lizards today have developed cecal valves, which Johnson describes as “muscles between the large and small intestine . . . that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation’s cellulose into volatile fatty acids.” This “brand-new structure,” as Irschick calls it, allowed the lizards to digest plant material.
But Answers in Genesis anatomist David Menton, after reviewing the research, noted that the original lizards did have the ability to digest plant material; they simply preferred insects for roughly 95 percent of their dietary needs. (This is also in line with the Bible’s teaching that all animals were originally vegetarian—which would mean these lizards’ ancestors, at least, had the capability to digest plants, and that genetic information could exist latently in the modern lizards.)
Hendry wonders, as Menton suggests, if the change was simply the lizards’ “plastic response to the environment.”
Furthermore, Menton adds, “The ‘new’ muscular valve they found between the small and large intestine is simply an enlargement of muscles already present in the gut wall at this juncture.” In other words, far from being a truly new feature, the shift in available food allowed lizards with larger muscles at the juncture to be more successful at feeding and reproducing.
Menton also suggests that if the lizards were returned to their original habitat, the cecal valve feature may dwindle as the lizards returned to an insectivorous diet.
Apparently the researchers aren’t even sure about the genetic basis for the change, another suggestion that the “evolution” did not involve any new genetic information in the lizards. McGill University biologist Andrew Hendry noted, “All of this might be evolution. The logical next step would be to confirm the genetic basis for these changes” (emphasis added). Hendry wonders, as Menton suggests, if the change was simply the lizards’ “plastic response to the environment.”
Thus, once again, this so-called “evolution” is possibly just natural selection acting on pre-existing genetic information, helping a population adapt to its surroundings. However, without knowing the exact genetic or epigenetic mechanism(s) underlying the change, we can’t determine exactly what is going on, biologically speaking. (To read more about the possibilities, read “Life: Designed by God to Adapt.”)
More important (as Irschick said) is the speed of the changes, which reminds us of how quickly the original created kinds could have varied into the biodiversity we see today (interrupted by the Noachian Flood event).”
https://answersingenesis.org/natural-selection/adaptation/island-evolves-lizards/
Smoke and mirrors. Catholics need to get their heads straight on this topic, because so many are suckers to this con that’s been pulled on them for the last 100 years. The same for Copernicanism.
Actually everything represented in these so called fictional representations
already exists. It’s funny but most of the elements of science fiction
written decades ago have come true. It’s almost as if in humanities wildest
imaginings we are somehow connected to not only the past but to the future.
Perhaps in some way we coexist with the future and can see its outline on some
subconscious level often expressed as art. There is the very real possibility of life
extension like say 900 year old biblical figures coming incrementally into view.
Mr Johnno,
That was a fine overview of how evolution works. It is not creatio de novo. There must always be some material cause on which the efficient cause can work. It’s not magic, after all. It’s transformation, not creation; i.e., a transition from one form to another.
(Fanboys of evolution often don’t get it, either, and only use the concept as a club to beat naive literalists.)
One of the “answers in Genesis” was pointed out by Augustine, lo these many centuries ago. God gave the earth the power to bring forth the living kinds, and I didn’t see where He ever revoked that grant. And as he said [and I repeated] built in the things to be in the “roots of time”; i.e., as potentia.
Copernicanism did not survive because he insisyed on using perfect Platonic circles in his model. He wound up with more epicycles that Peuerbach’s updated Ptolrmaic model. The Tychonic model did as well because it was mathematically equivalent to Copernicus. But the brass ring went to Kepler and then to Newton.
We were visiting the grandkids. They were deeply engrossed in one of their superhero kid shows; I was reading on my phone, happy for the respite. A heated argument broke out – apparently one of the superhero kids suddenly developed a new superpower, getting our heroes out of an impossibly tight spot, and the older grandkid was having none of it. She can’t do that! Apparently even superhero kid shows can jump the shark.
I’ve been convinced for a while now that writers are trained in one of two non-overlapping sub-specialties. One specialty gets the protagonist(s) into tight spots, the second specialty gets them out. Every show uses a pair of these writers, and they don’t like each other. The first writer comes up with the most outrageous predicament, then throws the script over the wall with a note in the margin “write yourself out of this one, Joan Wilder”. We’ve been re-watching the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents series . . . something has definitely been lost; the basic art of story-telling, perhaps?
Not long after getting a job in the “real world”, I fell in love with the promise of optimization. No surprise there, I guess, since I had been so thoroughly steeped in Evolution Theory’s random mutation and survival of the fittest ideas, taught as undisputed fact. If optimization could create a human from pond scum, it could do anything, right? And with a computer, you could do it much faster, right? Often my first approach to a new design challenge was to use computer optimization techniques. Sometimes optimization worked, or at least helped, but more often it just wasted time. It took me years to understand why. I followed the field of optimization with interest, and tried new techniques I read about. One technique that became popular for non-linear optimization problems was called the polytope method – it was supposed to be able to ‘hop over’ some pesky local minima that foiled the traditional optimization techniques. So I coded up a generic implementation that I could use in the future, and tested it with a simple set of simultaneous non-linear equations in two dimensions. It converged quickly, but to a local minimum which wasn’t a valid solution. Since the technique was supposed to provide good immunity from getting stuck in local minima, I figured I had made a coding mistake and went about debugging it. It turned out that the objective function had an infinity of local minima, and the local minima got infinitesimally close to each other the closer one got to the correct answer. All that from a very simple set of equations! After much effort, I was finally able to find an objective function that was ‘steep enough’ that the local minima flattened out to ‘fill the potholes’, and the optimization finally converged on the right answer.
After that experience, I decided that optimization is like that old cartoon with a mathematician in front of a blackboard filled with equations, being asked “can you be a little more specific in step 3”, where step 3 is “then a miracle occurs”. In Evolution Theory, that miracle is the objective function, which I have yet to see explicitly addressed. Once you define an amenable objective function, the rest of optimization is just turning the crank, even if it takes Mother Nature millions of years. But without a magic objective function, Mother Nature can turn that crank for trillions years and nothing will ever come of it.
Of course, I’m sure the Evolution Theory proponents would counter that the objective function itself evolved. That concept breaks my brain – is it a valid counter-argument, or just another version of “turtles all the way down”?
Maybe God created the magic objective function and let ‘er rip? Evidence-wise, that seems as valid a belief as anything. Put another way, an Evolution Theory that still requires a step labelled “and then a miracle occurs” cannot logically be used to dismiss God from the picture.
Cottermania – the ability to prune trees using just the mind. I love it. Grandkids are probably going to change the channel, though.
Point of fact the creators of superman, two Jews. based their hero on
biblical descriptions of figures like Moses and the Elohim who are the ‘shining ones’.
Superman Is Jewish: The Hebrew Roots of America’s Greatest Superhero
https://www.thedailybeast.com/superman-is-jewish-the-hebrew-roots-of-americas-greatest-superhero
Dear YOS. I readily concede you are way more intelligent than I am so there is no chance you can convince me of materialistic or theistic evolution cos I am a Roman Catholic who accepts with alacrity what Divine Revelation has revealed and what HoleyMother Church teaches;
Medieval Sourcebook:
Twelfth Ecumenical Council:
Lateran IV 1215
The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215
CANON 1
Text: We firmly believe and openly confess that there is only one true God, eternal and immense, omnipotent, unchangeable, incomprehensible, and ineffable, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; three Persons indeed but one essense, substance, or nature absolutely simple; the Father (proceeding) from no one, but the Son from the Father only, and the Holy Ghost equally from both, always without beginning and end. The Father begetting, the Son begotten, and the Holy Ghost proceeding; consubstantial and coequal, co-omnipotent and coeternal, the one principle of the universe, Creator of all things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal, who from the beginning of time and by His omnipotent power made from nothing creatures both spiritual and corporeal, angelic, namely, and mundane, and then human, as it were, common, composed of spirit and body.
Dear Mr Crank,
I think you may be blinkered by scientism. You seem to envision the Creator as “just another physical cause in the world,” in rivalry with other causes. If God “creates all things,” then He created my lunch just now [Lebanon bologna sandwich on whole wheat, since you ask]. But that does not preclude my having made it as well. Primary Cause does not exclude secondary causes.
Similarly, evolution is not creation. They don’t even address the same thing. Evolution, like all secondary causes, is a transformation. Matter in one form is changed into another form. Meat, bread, butter are transformed into sandwich. Creation is not only ex nihilo but continuo. It’s going on at every moment, sustaining things in being. As the late Pope Benedict once wrote, [cf. Creation and Evolution: A Conference with Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo (Ignatius Press, 2008)] creation encompasses the entire trajectory of a thing, its becoming as well as its being.
Hence, the comic-book absurdity of the Marvel mutants, as in the OP.
Amen, YOS, exactly correct. For physically embodied life, via chemistry; chemists know (if they really think about it), that chemistry is shuffling from various kinds, through specific ways, from potential to actual. Catch is finding or knowing just what the necessary and sufficient conditions are (besides He said I AM starting it all and keeps it going).
Briggs has superpowers. Just the other day, he told us what Benedict was thinking of something.
I have superpowers too. Truth always manages to find me even when I am not looking for it. Just ask Briggs. He would agree with me. lol
Dear YOS. I don’t know how you arrived at either me thinking God is just another physical cause or that first and secondary causes somehow confirm evolution after having read what I posted from The 4th Lateran Council so I think some eisegesis is involved in your reading.
As for what the late Pope wrote, he is all over the map in many areas of theology and his personal opinions not only do not trump a teaching from an ecumenical council, his personal opinions are not even in the game.
https://voxday.net/2022/07/12/evolutionary-epicycles-and-episyntheses/
I will leave it at that.
O, and Vatican 1 also reiterated the teaching from
On the Origin of Species. Introduction.
When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle,’ as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species–that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years’ work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.
My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. Last year he sent to me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir C. Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew of my work–the latter having read my sketch of 1844–honoured me by by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr. Wallace’s excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts.
Wadda Dick.
Darwin conspired with Sr Charles Lyell and The Linnean Society to publish a faux paper by Darwin so he could beat the man who developed the argument about the origin of the species/evolution.?
That man was William Wallace (a commoner, a damn fly-catcher) whom Sir Charles Lyell wanted to prevent from being acknowledged as the inventor of the theory so he told Darwin to get his ass in gear and write an abstract.
Darwin initially refused cos he feared it woould be obvious he wrote it after reading the theory of that damn fly catcher.
The poor old honest fly catcher Wallace, he had written a formal twenty one scientific treatise for publication but we are to believe that Darwin had intended to write the same damn thing for years but had no gotten around to it until the night before the meeting of the Linnean Society (Linnean is an old english word apparently meaning lying)
.
Did I mention that Ol’ Darwy Dear was a member of the Royal Society of London whereas Wallace was a damn fly catcher.
Alos, it bears noting that the cosmology of Old Darwy was pilfered from the Navajos, only their myth had the progenitor of all as four or five midges whereas Old Darwy changed that to four of five cells bobbing up and down in some warm water somewhere.
A student asked Ol Darwy where they came from and he confessed “ I don’t know. Isn’t it enough I’ve bought you man and all the animals in the world”
Ol’ Darwin was a world class liar and a thief of the intellectual property of another who was constrained to steal a Navajo Myth to explain it all.
Yes, education is a joke and Ol’ Darwy is its biggest and most successful joke ever cos the scientists don’t know who Darwin is and what he did
Because you seem to think that theories of evolution somehow compete with creation, as if nature were somehow independent of God. After all, if God said, “Let there be light,” who needs a theory of electromagnetism?
There was nothing in your snippet from the Lateran council that said that species of living things could not change over the centuries, or that God’s creative act is bound by time.
Creator of all things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal, who from the beginning of time and by His omnipotent power made from nothing creatures both spiritual and corporeal, angelic, namely, and mundane, and then human, as it were, common, composed of spirit and body.
Yes, that teaching does refer to creation as always understood – Adam and Eve fully formed as were the animals and fish and plants etc created prior to them – until relatively modern times, whereas there is not even a remote hint that teaching means God created a few cells that bobbed around in some warm water before becoming just so animals.
Of course man changes over time but man has always been man, not a former monkey (or even a politician) or any other animal.
Evolution has not only competed with creation it has replaced it in the minds of most men – especially scientists.
God is not in nature. He is entirely separate from it although His His providence keeps it in existence. Hindus might believed God is nature but not Christians
I think someone really into these themes should write a treatise showing why and how much of the actual present day science we have is based on assumptions and choices, many of which depend on the state of knowledge of the time when they were first made, rather than certainty. I mean the usual level of, not a dead certainty, as in ‘dead certain’. It would be (perhaps) an eye opener. As in sausages, one should see science in the making and not just the embelishments.
Precisely. That is why if a population changes over time, God has still created it. As Aquinas wrote, God sees everything all at once in a sort of eternal ‘now.’ So, if a population of wolves become more doggish and ends up as a St Bernard or a chihuahua, it is an evolatus.
Of course not. Monkeys are a separate lineage. Recall, “man” means something different to someone like St Augustine than it does to a biologist. The latter see only the physical, whereas Augustine could see that any being with intellect and will is a “man,” no matter how bizarre his physical appearance. Intellect and will are immaterial; they don’t fossilize. Who knows how long the human clay was walking around before the spirit was “breathed into” him.
Do not try to limit God. If He can create light through electromagnetism, he can create biological species any way he wants. New species either e-volunt from existing species as Aquinas suggested, or they just *poof into being. Spoiler alert: they don’t *poof.
The true origin of species is when a population are sufficiently similar that humans give them a common name.
So claim the atheists. But they are wrong, for they don’t understand creation and as often as not evolution.
Wolves can eat blueberries. They are not and never were vegetarians.
The animals in Genesis were all domesticated animals. They didn’t have wolves, badgers, etc on the limited-space ma-gur-gur (submarine).
Stop being as stupid as political leftists.
Pingback: Do We Need Philosophy, Or Can Science Replace It? – William M. Briggs
Pingback: The I Have Ascended Beyond Fallacy – William M. Briggs