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Saturday, March 21, 2009

But it's like, NOT design, okay? It all just happened!

A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.
It all just happened, okay?
The work also confirms an idea first floated in an 1858 essay by Alfred Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin co-discovered the theory of evolution. Wallace had suspected that certain systems undergoing natural selection can adjust their evolutionary course in a manner "exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident." In Wallace's time, the steam engine operating with a centrifugal governor was one of the only examples of what is now referred to as feedback control. Examples abound, however, in modern technology, including cruise control in autos and thermostats in homes and offices.

The research, published in a recent edition of Physical Review Letters, provides corroborating data, Rabitz said, for Wallace's idea. "What we have found is that certain kinds of biological structures exist that are able to steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness," said Rabitz, the Charles Phelps Smyth '16 Professor of Chemistry. "The data just jumps off the page and implies we all have this wonderful piece of machinery inside that's responding optimally to evolutionary pressure."
Reality check: Wallace was sidelined by the Darwin mob because he was not a materialist atheist, even though many regard him as by far the more original thinker.

I am sorry, but that is just true. I cannot change history to suit your local drudge museum curator who has a grant or your local textbook writer who has a contract to front Darwin. I would say, however, just quietly ignore those people. They have their money, but they do not have the evidence.

Sadly,
The work is likely to provoke a considerable amount of thinking, according to Charles Smith, a historian of science at Western Kentucky University.
No it will not. In the age of the Darwin cult, it will be ignored. For now. Not forever.

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