What was it that comprised Von Neumann’s skepticism about evolution?

It was an attitude in three aspects. Von Neumann, in the first place, saw what mathematicians had seen since Darwin first published his theory. The theory required life to clamber over some very sobering improbabilities; indeed, it seemed to require miracles. Other mathematicians were making the same point. “[T]he formation within geological time of a human body,” Kurt Gödel remarked in conversation with Hao Wang, “by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”

Note the word geological. Gödel, like everyone else, quite understood that Darwin’s theory played out over long stretches of time. He might even have grasped the concept of natural selection, commonly said to be too difficult for all but a handful of initiates. He was skeptical nonetheless. It was precisely to do battle against this kind of skepticism that Richard Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker. His proximate target may have been the physicist, Fred Hoyle, but his general target was a whole climate of opinion current among mathematicians and physicists.

Von Neumann, in the second place, thought Darwin’s theory inadequate. He thought the theory inadequate because the theory did not yet exist. This is as inadequate as it gets. What did exist lacked the fundamentals. It answered no questions. It had no depth. And it was largely anecdotal. This sense of anecdotal has nothing to do with the idea of just-so stories made popular by Lewontin and Gould. Darwin’s theory was anecdotal, Von Neumann suggested, because it lacked the rich and productive concepts that only mathematicians could provide the sciences.

Writing in the 1967 Wistar Symposium, Murray Eden offered a fine sense of the way in which mathematicians and physicists thought Darwin’s theory inadequate. “…[T]he continuity of evolution does not demonstrate that natural laws are operative, for the laws are not known.”

Murray then added a most useful analogy. “It is,” he wrote referring to Darwin’s theory, “as if some pre-Newtonian cosmologist had proposed a theory of planetary motion which supposed that natural force of unknown origin held the planets to their courses.”

Just so. This is what Darwin’s theory is like; and it was how it appeared to a great many mathematicians and physicists.

And then Murray added a demurral. “The supposition is right enough and the idea of a force between two celestial bodies is a very useful one, but it is hardly a theory.”

Far from being controversial among mathematicians in the 1940s and 1950s, a sense of the inadequacy of Darwin’s theory was widespread.

And there is a third and final component to Von Neumann’s skepticism, this one no more than a hint. To say that Von Neumann was skeptical of Darwin’s theory is not to say that he was a supporter of intelligent design. I have no reason to think so. I know nothing about his religious views. Yet there is a curious remark he made to Stan Ulam. I suspect that he made the remark at the end of his life. Von Neumann pointed to a house in the distance and remarked to Ulam how absurd it would be to think that the house just assembled itself. The men were discussing Darwin’s theory. It was not simply a doubt about improbability to which Von Neumann gave voice: It was a more general susurrus of discontent.

David Berlinski

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“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” 

 Everlasting Man, 1925

Experimental Data Force Researchers to Admit There’s “No Such Thing As Junk RNA”

Originally, proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution lauded “junk” DNA as functionless genetic garbage that showed life is the result of blind and random mutational events. Then “junk” DNA was disproved by the discovery that the vast majority of DNA is being transcribed into RNA. Did the failure of this Darwinian assumption cause evolutionists to terminate their love affair with biological “junk”? Of course not. They just shifted their argument back, claiming that the cell is full of “junk RNA”—DNA that is being transcribed into RNA but still does nothing in the cell. Earlier this year we reported on a Nature paper suggesting function for “junk” RNA. Now a Science Daily NewsArticle is confirming that finding. Aptly titled “No Such Thing As ‘Junk RNA,’ Say Researchers,” the article reports that very small strands of RNA termed “usRNAs” (unusually small RNAs) perform important functions related to gene regulation.

“The US has every characteristic of a failed state.

Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interests of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens.

For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war’s financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.

“It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome,” said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.

According to reports, the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone.”

A lunatic blabbing? The Speaker for some hard libertarian group?

No, just a FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY warning!

The latest by Jeremy Grantham.