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BULLETIN THIRTY NINE

LINING UP THE LAWS

As one reads Dr. J.C. Sanford's Genetic Entropy in its 4th and substantially extended version in terms of every trick and trial to which the thesis is subjected, and further  considers all the attempts to sidetrack, subvert, invert, contort, slide, and then finds all the refutations in terms of ONE general guiding principle for the specialty, it is like viewing a desert from on high in an aircraft. What is the thesis ? it is here chiefly that Primary Axiom is false, can be nullified, and requires an alternative. The Axiom in view ? It is the concept that undirected mutation is the source of the hi-tech results by means of natural selection.

How do you falsify it in terms of science ? asks Sanford. It is by showing what does work robustly, and so consigning what does not to the scrap heap of discarded, unsustainable ideas. How is it annulled ? It is shown in general and in ever so many particulars that in a world that has on call and in operation,  the Second Law of Thermodynamics, this is the position. Just letting it go does not develop it, entropy does decrease without intervention from outside the system, and there is no miracle currently occurring to falsify it. Thus, depreciation of the asset of life expressed in genes, chromosomes and genomes is continual, has been, and in no vast time would lead to meltdown, that is, to entire failure for this form of life to function. As Christ put it (Matthew 24:22), Except He returned no flesh (biological life, esp. man) could continue. He is always right, and here as normal.

The point is made that just as in a handbook for making a jet plane, ungoverned mistakes, so called stochastic advance, a mere formulation of the theory without ground, reason or answer, but a mantra has no more realism than any other movement into nullity. It is words by rote, or vote, not based either on logic or experiment, nor on computer programs. Sanford however has a judicious grouping of realistic elements in his complex program to mirror reality, Mendel's  Accountant, in which all known relevant elements are given representation, and so a test is provided. It overwhelmingly supports his own experimental and far-reaching investigations.

It is similar with synergistic epistasis, a natural and increasing combining of effects of things working in some kind of unison and collation, which is not what is found, but  instead there is a generic degeneration of the genome, where there are numerous impossible elements for it to be otherwise. Firstly, as in a highly technical, output oriented space-ship manual, with vast interactions of information items the one with the other, and of the results when built, with many laws and features and foci in the universe, typing errors do not help. The ground is too interactive, stringent, multiply oriented to permit anything other than the most minimal mini-miracles when the wrong number, sequential item or  specification is inserted.

The more the tension of symbols, natural laws and specifications, the more the complexity, the more the layers of mutually related interactions, the more the multiple functions of given nucleotides, and their capacities whether to be read backwards, forwards or to interact variously, to correlate with numbers in assembly line productions, the MORE harm will be done by failing to conform stringently. The worse it will then be mentally to measure up to the collation of code items, building sites, data-material correlation. If like a scratch on the surface, a degenerative degradation, or adaptation in the genome, should occur, this, like a hole in one, in golf, would be an item of intense surprise, and add no new systematic information, but constitute a sidewalk of permissible change, not notionally incorporated into the integrality of the whole. That is not its sophisticated way of working.

Incidentally, it is good to see Dr Sanford bringing out the feature of the integral character of the whole affair (Integrality was the earlier name used on our own site): something  far more than any one of its parts, and beyond indeed, mere harmony, in a individually striking multi-phase, unitary kind combination. Man is a magnificent example of it. This was one of the features among many others beyond irreducible complexity, brought out in the volume, Bewilderment, Bedazzlement ... Ch. 3 (2008) and other volumes in this series. It is good when different studies coalesce well, both older and newer.

Always in all simplicity, if the series, multiple  connections, designations in language (code), specification of effective meaning for symbols, and consistency in the same on a systematic basis, so tying the symbol to the substance, the command to the consequence, the totality of concept to the individuality of component, is vast, then there is all the more room for typing errors, copying failures, duplications, omissions. If this represents no lack of entropy, then short of intrusion from outside such a system as ours is found to be, what is the result ?

It is this, that there MUST be deterioration, whatever incidental and non-systematic variations may come as defects in the original, which may still work (the race on this earth is not yet past, but  as Sanford and many others cited show, is deteriorating very decidedly in its specifications charts, spreads, language). Failure does not achieve success. Spoliation does not achieve construction. Friction does not increase bulk, and indifference to the meaning of symbols (by chance errors) does not increase vast triumphs in their consistent usage, enabling marvels of machination such as man, who can even machinate as one of his own functions, to exist. Failures do not create successes; negative capacities do not enshrine themselves in creation work. Indeed, the writing of DNA nowadays outside the presence of intelligence, is not found, and yet the world is full of it, even one human having the equivalent of many volumes of an encyclopedia in billions of cells in the body!

Can chance working on nothing achieve this! and the more so,  when chance itself cannot be taken as nothing, but an aspect of a system at work where an outside purpose does not enter.

Moreover, in every field examined, Dr Sanford shows systematic and explicable relationship to the general proposition  that the Primary Axiom fails, and that the contrary, the alternative in view,  prevails. Design is the name, thought is the conveyor belt, symbols are the orderers, substance is the butt. Indeed, it is to this sink-hole of words into factual confrontation with their meaning, that he directs attention. Yet NO theory can countermand the downward thrust of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, no introduction from casualness can conform it to increasing complexity, or to the unitary resultant of high symbolic specification expressed in mutuality, with vast domains of interaction from the same symbols in different fields in different ways. Let us SEE this. If we did, the Law would fail, and the wear and tear, the failure over time of what is contrived and confined in this world, would find a disappearing trick for its evacuation!

What needs a word from this approach is entirely simple. NO words, NO connotations (let alone operative ones), NO systems, NO things can come from nowhere, or nothing. That cannot be the source without dismissing reason, which action, dismisses all capacity of the contestant to be  able themselves logically to argue. To do this leads to nonsense, both in thought and in argument. To negate all that is and could be (potential is not nothing), and so have nothing as the original totality has a meaning. It MEANS that nothing can happen for there is nothing from which it could happen. Something must ALWAYS have been there, for if not, there would be nowhere from which it could come, and nothing to make it do so or provide nice little bursts of creativity in effect. Instead, you are left with just nothing,  all powerless, non-existent, not even a void, which requires space.

The Something must always have been adequate for mind, spirit, vision,  concept, thought, personality, as well as material architecture and architectural units, for if it ever were not, there would be nowhere from which sufficiency could come. The Eternal God is the name usually used.

His laws are the main subject matter of science, whatever philosophical game be played by individual scientists, or their fashion groupings (it would be hard to surpass in philosophical preference as the explicit basis, with no available, cogent support from  reason, better than that discernible in the famous word of Professor Lewontin (cf. The  Splendour ... Ch. 3, World Amiss, Heaven Aboard Ch. 15). That is merely one expression of a creed however, long  apparent,  and here charmingly stated, so that it is not a subversive invasion as so often, undefended and indefensible,  but more than this, a simple  religious statement about the ultimate nature of things. For my part, as in SMR and TMR and the other 238 volumes  published on this site, I prefer exhaustive, enduring, evidentially appraised, testimony to which reason does and must give  the nod.  This is not to extinguish faith, but to give a reason for it. Clearly focussed thus are the Bible and its saving focus, the Lord Jesus Christ, as it not only diagnoses not the underlying pain and problem, with man as he faces life, but in Him presents the cure.

But with what ardour does Dr Sanford examine proposition after proposition ostensibly favouring the Primary Axiom, view after view, contest after contest as different viewpoints are taken, put into the factual,  statistical complex of reality, and found wanting. Is, for example, beneficial mutation that may in some situation work (degenerate sickle cells for anaemia) allay the devastating continuation of degrading mutation ? Can this or that mechanism achieve this miracle of results with no perceptible operative cause on that model ? Try what you will, there is but one result, his work shows, case by case. As to the BENEFICIAL mutations, this is a matter of vocabulary, not reality. True, some things may ALLAY the rate of decline, but NEVER are new pieces of information found to be invented on the current scene, to advance the systematic construction and its components. Nothing is created; merely limited in their desecrations are the adventitious positive steps. Degenerative adaptation is then another thing, allaying the negatives of what is staying, but not removing them. Losing money at a reduced rate can help; but it does not embellish your account.

For example, individual nucleotides are not in general selected, as their impact is not relevant to advance, though they may cause damage. It is in larger segments that relevant changes occur, and in these, though there be something which superficially gives some local or passing advantage, it is not advance. Always with anything in some sense of the term, progressive in result, generation by generation, will have with it, a far larger amount of what is negative, waylaid, disturbed, distorted as in any handbook. This is the way, literally, it goes, as Sanford's computing program, Mendel's Accountant,  with all known, relevant components in place, confirms. Marvellous is anything that does not destroy in part or whole, when downgrade over time occurs! But the entirety is remorselessly going down, mutations now seen to be arising in far larger quantities, many orders of magnitude more, than often thought not very long ago. Moreover, it is the marginal lowerings in the genes which aggregate and congregate so freely, for there is no significant selective pressure against minimalist decline, set in the midst of larger changes. The little help is in the context of the large hindrance. Decline thus accumulates destructively.

As to the weight, the cost of having such poor copies, what is this ? It is the negative additives that must go in terms of the overall direction, the statistical weight, that is generic. This, as Sanford details,  has often been measured by earlier scientists with concern for the race or the effect, even when the mutation rate was deemed far less than it is now shown to be.  Thus on p. 209, we have what is headed as Loewe's Limit. Cited in this connection by Sanford, we find that there is something unexpected to that scientist. It is that "a surprisingly large range of realistic parameter combinations," should have ended the imaginary line to humans, in 20,000,000, years: that is, man should by then through degradations and mutations, have ceased to exist.

However, with much recent research to hand, Dr Sanford notes this: "Loewe's limit for extinction was based on the damage associated with the mitochondrial genome only." That is, it was a study for one area only,  and hence not the overall result. Sanford adds: "The whole genome is degenerating roughly 200,000 times faster," bold added. This is no small indication concerning age!  It is very minor. Many lines of research, including that on mutation rate in influenza viruses, confirm and conform to the fact that degeneration is NOT overcome by oddities, quirks, anomalies, but that these at best are degenerative ameliorations or adaptations (that is, facilities to allay which do not stay the general downward dynamic direction), not able to counterpose weight to the increasing entropy, failure and decline.

What then is really happening in this philosophical endeavour so well illustrated by Lewontin, but shown by thousands of those teaching the young under governmental, academic prescription, as they exercise what was once military conscription ? It is now philosophic and militant atheist prescription, with painful consequences if you diverge, despite the  sometimes found endeavour to  patronise religion, and remove it quietly from the operative scene.

In effect, it is not a little like saying to students, Now there is a little operation, putting your eyes out: it is for your own good, to help you see better with our equipment.

This is not an exaggeration. The net effect is to propagandise them without the slightest rational ground, and contrary to scientific reality, to disbelieve that any god you can mention, not excluding God  Almighty, is in the simple, factual realm (let alone the cause and basis of all logic whether in our minds or in the 'nature' we research). Yet respect for and reliance on Almighty God is not only noted in the Preamble to our Constitution, but  respect for reason which cannot avoid Him (cf. SMR, TMR) has everything to do with biological reality, creation, or anything else that can offer without myth, to command the mind of man.

Instead, the fatuous is favoured. Thus if you remove the real cause of someone's wealth, you might imagine he found it in a cave; but this is mere imagination. Yet it is this kind of desperation which comes when the actuality is rejected in terms of some roving principle that favours psychological acceptance. Thus some would hold that marvellous sudden bursts of creativity come from nowhere in particular, for no reason in particular, to do myriads of things in particular, billions indeed if you take all the cells, which in march time, bring vast concerted leaps in technology and living advance. So it goes.

But it is never found, located for the actual source is dismissed a priori, as if someone grew sick of a tennis career and decided to play marbles, meanwhile unable to bear any reference to tennis. The FACTthat the Bible stated most clearly that God ONCE acted in a short period and invented the whole material universe including life, and human life, and then FINISHED, and that this is precisely echoed in the evidence seems without any notable impact on those who exclude rational thought. Naturalistic mysticism and irrationality seems to many an irresistible fad.

Yet this fact is the plainest of verifications of creation and negation of the idea of casual brilliance coming en masse,  now and again or other myth!  The FACT of this writing in symbolic form for the construction of each generation of human beings, of its BEING there, that is, the words that operate (in DNA and its correlatives), without the same sort of writing now being further found to be working in this way, seems ejected, like a pilot from a diving aeroplane. The plane still crashes however. It is not talk but actuality which says the more.

Such things are sustainable as methods ? such dismissals are evidentially required ?

That is science ? It is exceedingly bad philosophy. It lineage is foul, in its elements. Consider. No reason, no ground, nothing time based on actual operation of the events, perceptible, no prescribed periodicity, programs or bases! Really ? just surmise without background, other than NEED, to feed the  foolish philosophy, involved because the desire to  kill God is in many as great as it was at Calvary, whether realised or not. It is not only the ostensible motive which operates as in crime; it is also the actual and underlying thrust, which sometimes man suppresses, because he does not like to face it directly. See on this Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4, 5, 6. Sanford also touches on this point.

Again, despite the fact that  scientifically, work is normatively required to fashion the underlying material components in this world, by means of mental vision and personal purpose, and the Second  Law of Thermodynamics is indicative of what is to be overcome by creativity and intervention,  for the sustaining of envisioned and imparted organisation: something else is proposed. And this ?

It is imagined that  the opposite in that little case of human life, is what works. It is just that it is never seen to do it,  Here it all  comes simply, it appears. If you destroy, fight each other, degrade materials and exult, you can watch man grow to superman. However, it is not observable: it is only that given time, he may learn more of what was put into the universe, and its prescribed mode of operation. He was a gifted creation including logic to find the logic behind the laws of God in the universe, where he may act as an investigator. This logic ? it rolled up on a quiet Sunday afternoon ? However, in observable fact, orderly stringency and lawful activity do not arise by disorder. Why seek to justify what is precisely the opposite of the required conditions for what is in view ? Is it literally, the im-pertinence which propels this confusing departure from logic and events ? There is always a cost.

Alas, to mention one, in fact World War I and II and III and any further  efforts for IV, which are now progressing without much refinement, have significanat results. They devastate, delete, destroy, degrade, ruin, eat up resources, fire diseases, augment distress and frequently come from imaginations of superiority on the part of those whose interest is the use of FORCE. Some technical things are to atone for the loss of millions in anguish ? This is creative, inventive, innovative, desirable IN THE  PHYSICAL REALITY OF MAN ? or in his understanding expressed in action ?  What glory! What sham and shame is this glory!

In  effect, this is to chop off the head, not only physically, but mentally and symbolically, as if realisation of a better way, such as shown in the very co-operative, technical wonders in our own bodies, were a sin or crime or blasphemy. Man, biblically and actually, is under arraignment from God and if he continues on this way, he will only inherit shame (Daniel 12, Matthew 13), as so often exhibited in history. He will find judgment.

What is wrong is not a subject for song, but correction, and when evil is called good and good evil, the Bible indicates (Isaiah 5:19-20), there is a call for "woe". It is like having  dirt a necessity before a doctor could operate.

Has then man increasingly come to worship himself, gender bending merely a symptom,  denied in the normative case by billions of cells in each person's  own body ? is his will to supplant its source and significance ? The latest surge in blatant latency, that is, the concept that man is a virtual god and must rule anything rulable - or for that matter, unrulable, by his imaginary superiority, is active. It is ruining youth increasingly, setting society on edge, and enhancing unruly religious rages. Every callow thrust, personal or national contestant,  must be the best, without reason or ground, but by will and culture, which is a new god, to be worshipped as a sort of surrogate for society doing so directly, at the very feet of itself. Some religions further, refuse to be criticised, even to have this voiced. Punishment is to replace a rational answer. 

Freeway to error, and hiding from reality, this is a hardihood which many adopt, tired of seeking for truth, of relishing its rationality, and, being fired with its openness, loving it. Let those who disagree with freedom of speech be persecuted, says the secular State! Such is the dismal cry. Such is the religious danger, voiding the Constitutional requirement on religion, in Australia now. A secular blasphemy law would be intimidatory to many, and give false credibility to others. It would de facto be an enforced type of religion with its moral, evaluative and investigatory aspects all confined and contained. It would of course also violate the Constitution (Section 116), but that is common already is an apparently conscienceless flirtation with fancy. 

Force without truth is premature; its use is immature; its results are ruin.

It is not only that the genome which is degenerating, though by divine grace to this day, the body continues in some form to work; but that there is still available the regenerating reality the only realisable resultant that remains (John 3). The Creator has not lost His creative power, either to make peace, to grant pardon or to regenerate the spirit in man, through the Prince of Peace; or to provide truth. What has only interaction and reaction has no truth as a system and hence cannot even rationally tell us about itself. As the Bible predicted, man as he progressed towards his end as a race, would turn to myths with a pronounced desire, as with an itch, and here it is an itch to hitch to  degradation in every way (cf II Timothy 3 and 4).