I like Berlinski because he is witty, sarcastic and funny but also unquestionably an intellectual and an expert in many scientific disciplines, including; mathematics, biology, physics and philosophy.

He is also an anti-Darwinist and enjoys skewering the Darwin priesthood. In many ways he is their worst nightmare; informed, glib, not a Christian, an Agnostic (still working on him), not a “fundamentalist” and that alone robs Darwinist’s of some of their most often used and cherished rhetorical weapons.

What’s the best way to engage on a topic and take a position that some could claim was racist for example? Have a Black person or Hispanic or Asian person on who agrees with you. Or have a Republican support a Democrat political point of view or vice-versa. It would seem to make it more difficult to attack your view.

Berlinski is one of those guys who are more than the exception to the rule because in debate he eats those guys for breakfast. Christians like to have him on to co-sign their own feelings about the Darwin paradigm.

David Berlinski was raised in New York City, educated at Columbia College and received his PH.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University.

He later became a fellow of the faculty in Mathematics and a post-doctoral fellow in molecular biology at Columbia University. He has taught philosophy, mathematics and English at Stanford, Rutgers, Columbia, the Universite de Paris at Jussieu, the University of Puget Sound, the University of Santa Clara, San Jose State and San Francisco State.

His books refuting Darwinian Theory include; The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions. https://www.amazon.com/Devils.../dp/0465019374/ref=sr_1_2...
and, the Deniable Darwin
https://www.amazon.com/Deniab.../dp/B0799R1TV2/ref=sr_1_1...

Below are excerpts from an Interview with Coldwater Media, not necessarily in order:

On Name Calling

…we've lost something in this country because we've become afraid of controversy, afraid of polemics. That's not a healthy thing it's invigorating.

The question of whether name-calling is evidence of an imaginative paucity is hardly a fair question to put to me I mean because I revel in the name-calling and when I don't have an argument I tend to abuse my opponents just as easily as they tend to abuse me.

Again I don't think too much should be made of that. There is a pattern; it's not a scientific balanced pattern, in human affairs when people haven't been criticized in a long time they react with a great deal of indignation when they're criticized for the first time.

It's human nature I mean, put yourself in the position of a Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins who are used to being the regnant priests of a powerful orthodoxy and for the first time in their lives and someone says,

“Hey you guys are simply not credible.”

Of course, they're going to react with outrage and indignation hurl imprecations at others and resort to objurgations. It’s only normal.

If I remark that Daniel Dennett had his last idea in 1936 and it was under prenatal influences, what's wrong with that? It just sharpens the debate it puts a lot of emotional emphasis on the debate and it forces people to come up with something better.

That's the real point of name-calling; it forces people to come up with something better. There are other factors at work; a decline in standards of vituperation.

America used to be a country rich in insults. It really did. And we lose something in literary or intellectual culture when that's no longer accessible.

You get a guy like Daniel Dennett whose greatest intellectual achievement was growing that stupid beard of his masquerading as a scientific expert on Darwinian Theory, staring at the camera and no one is dousing him with a bucket of water. It's incredible to me.

Richard Dawkins is accepted as the great intellect and a fine Prose stylist, too. The guy writes and his prose resembles a string of sponges strung together on a wash line. Should be said. Should be said.”

Unanswered Questions

In 1973 I was a post-doc in molecular biology at Columbia University and it was a time really of a lot of intense discussion. I had a lot of friends who were post-docs and subjects came up naturally and I just happened to come across a copy of the Wistar symposium that was held in 1966 in Philadelphia.

It's a collection of essays about Darwinian theory and I read Murray Eden's article critical article about Darwin theory and Marcel Schultz and (Max)Burger’s critical argument about Darwinian theory and I started talking about it with the other post-doctoral fellows; people who were working in the laboratory at the time and I discovered somewhat to my own surprise that the arguments which seem so very credible and very important went virtually unanswered among the biologists that I knew who tended to dismiss the arguments in a way that suggested they hadn't really understood them and if they had understood them were not prepared to respond to them and that was the beginning of my skepticism about Darwinian theory.

When I spent a year in Paris working with Sulzberger of course both of us enriched each other's opinions. Sulzberger had been a long-standing critic within a French biological establishment of Darwinian theory and what he had to say reinforced what I had to say and what I had to say reinforced what he had to say.

Later I talked with Murray Eden where a group of us who were similarly skeptical. I must say in the 70s in the late 60s and in the 70s there was a much more intensive degree of opposition to Darwinian theory a much, much greater willingness to examine Darwinian orthodoxies.

The great counter-reformation took place in the 1980s in the 1990s so when I started work and when I started thinking about these issues Sulzberger and I wanted to write a book together.

On this note there was a very relatively liberal attitude among mathematicians, people who were interested in physics. People who are interested in Darwinian theory had a much greater willingness to wonder whether any of this could possibly be true.

So that was roughly my own background and approach to it.

Head-Scratching Mathematicians

The claim that all skeptics of Darwinian orthodoxy are Christian fundamentalists stands refuted by me; it’s obviously not true as I am neither a Christian nor a fundamentalist.

Look, lots and lots of people are skeptical in the scientific community. I know of dozens of mathematicians who scratch their heads and say; you guys think that is the way life originated?

Absolutely a preposterous theory!

And many, many very significant figures. John von Neumann one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century just laughed at Darwinian Theory. He hooted at it.

So it’s perfectly absurd. This is a point in a polemical dispute; it’s not a reasonable standard of criticism.

Opposition to Darwinian theory is, I wouldn’t say widespread but there’s a consistent group of people; among mathematicians, among physicists and among a very good group of speculative biologists, who simply don’t accept it, who don’t even regard it as a scientific theory in any reasonable sense.

Dogs Stay Dogs, Bacteria Stay Bugs

,,,It’s tough to say because we're not dealing with a theory in any sense in which say a physicist would recognize. The theory we're dealing with is a collection of anecdotes of a certain point of view, a series of hunches.

I would say that the most outstanding of the salient points are, first of all the fossil record, which is simply mystifying. We can't make much sense of the fossil record. It does not sustain any kind of Darwinian prediction that can be intelligently derived from Darwinian Theory and it doesn't seem to sustain anything else as far as I can see.

It's a perfectly mystifying record.That's one obvious point.

Not talking just about the Cambrian explosion, I'm talking about everything that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the fossil record. Second point; we have never been able in any way theoretically to examine the central Darwinian claim that natural selection and random variation can account for a great deal of complexity.

If you look at the history of physics for example; what Newton knew in the 17th century; he said well the planets are being attracted to the Sun by a force.

It's not just any kind of force it's an inverse-square force and then he went and showed that if you make that assumption the result will be an orbit that conforms exactly to the observed orbit, say of the of the earth or of Mars.

It will be a conic section and then he proved the converse; that if it's a conic section the planets must be attracted to a central source by an inverse square law.
There is nothing like that in biology or in Darwinian Theory, a kind of a canonical demonstration that this mechanism; random variation and natural selection are adequate to the generation of this level of complexity.

From the point of view of the Serious Sciences, without that kind of a demonstration one is completely adrift. You have no idea whether the mechanism is adequate for its intended purposes.

This is the second point. Third, evidential piece of the puzzle; look I turn to the serious Sciences- you turn to general relativity or quantum mechanics.

I can program a computer with the equations of general relativity or with the equations of quantum mechanics and I can say all right what are the consequences? I can actually see the consequences emerge in a simulation.

We can't do any of this in biology and that should prompt any reasonable person to ask why not and if this is such a simple mechanism which can easily be programmed on a computer how come we can't set up a computer and create something of biological like complexity?

How come we cannot see the unfolding of an evolutionary process the way we can see the unfolding of an evolutionary process as in physics?

It's a very serious question. I've looked at all the genetic algorithms. I'm trying to write a genetic algorithm myself and the sheer fact is that without a tremendous amount of very special manipulation and ad hoc constraints the computer is not going to generate anything realistic if it uses Darwinian mechanisms.

It will generate something realistic only if it doesn't use Darwinian mechanism.

…..Finally there's the utter absence of laboratory evidence supporting random variation and natural selection. We should be able to start manipulating organisms. When we look at dogs no matter how far back we go its dogs and when we look at bacteria no matter what we do they stay bugs.

They don't change in their fundamental nature.

There seems to be some sort of an inherent species limitation and we have no good explanation for this in terms of Darwinian theory.

We should have far more flexibility and far more plasticity under laboratory conditions than we actually do if Darwinian theory or anything like that were correct. What we see in nature, what we see in the laboratory is very highly bounded variation and cyclic variation.

Self-Critical Science and Other Myths

We're asking for standards of behavior that it would be wonderful to expect but that no serious man actually does expect.

A hundred years of fraudulent drawing (Haeckel's drawings were discovered to be faked over 100 years ago but still appear in some biology textbooks) suggesting biological affinities that don't exist.

That's just what I would expect if biologists were struggling to maintain a position of power in a secular democratic society. Let's be reasonable, we're all sophisticated men and women here.

The popular myth that science is a uniquely self-critical institution and scientists as men who would rather be consumed at the stake rather than fudge their data.

I mean that's okay for a PBS special but that's not the real world. That's not what's taking place.

I mean people fudge the data whenever they can get away with it and then they will commit themselves to fraudulent drawings just so long as they're convinced that no one's looking over their shoulder and it's unrealistic, unsophisticated and unwise to expect people to do anything other than that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89IskZI740

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