it's time to take intelligent design seriously . why do i say that ? well i came across this book
recently " foresight " how the chemistry of life reveals planning and purpose
by professor marcos eberlin he's a professor of biochemistry in brazil
and one of the things that really struck me about this book was the recommendations and
endorsements there are three nobel prize winners . for example : sir john b golden who is an english
biologist who won the nobel prize in biology in 2012 wrote about this book : i am happy to recommend
this to those involved in the chemistry of life the author is well established in the field of
chemistry and presents the current interest in biology in the context of chemistry i am happy to
recommend the work this is a nobel prize winning body recommending a book on intelligent design
defending intelligent design another nobel prize winning physics an interesting study of the part
played by foresight in biology . now you may think that's very lukewarm an interesting study of the
part play by foresight and biology this is brian david josephson nobel prize in physics
from the university of cambridge as is gordon he's also from university of cambridge but hang on
if you look at the wikipedia site on intelligent design it's full of dismissals of id as a
pseudo creationist ideology . it has no scientific credibility at all you would think but there's two
nobel prize winners in physics and chemistry speaking highly of this book how can this be
there are pages of endorsements and recommendations by leading scientists around the
world . the last one a chap called michael d bowers who is a distinguished professor of biochemistry
at the university of california santa barbara says about the book : foresight provides refreshing new
evidence primarily from biology that science needs to open its perspective on the origin of living
things to account for the possibility that purely natural materialist evolution cannot account for
these facts the book is written in an easy to read style that will be appreciated by scientists and
non-scientists alike and encourages the reader to follow the truth wherever it leads as socrates
advised long ago so a ringing endorsement from the distinguished professor biochemistry at the
university of california and they'll say there are pages of recommendations so this book's
published by the discovery institute which is a leading intelligence design institution in the
united states . i must confess i disagree with that last recommendation a little bit this is not easy
to read i'm not a scientist , i have no scientific training whatsoever and i found a lot of this
beyond my pay grade i i couldn't understand it , it gets quite technical for me there are plenty of
passages which are understandable in ordinary everyday language , so i haven't read the whole
book because i can't but the recommendations are clear and i just wanted to share with you
a few bits of the book which i do understand which gives you a flavor of the thesis and the
key concept of this book is summed up in one word foresight so what is foresight
and why is it such an amazing intelligent design discovery ? so in the very first chapter foresight
in life the author tells us : biology is in the midst of a gold rush of discovery at my previous
academic institution the university of sao paulo in brazil . i ran the mass spectrometry laboratory
for 25 years there my team and i delved into many areas of chemistry biochemistry and medical
science until recently we're still too new to have names everything from petriomics lipidomics mass
spectrometry imaging to petroleum and bacteria fingerprinting , probably mispronounced a few words
there . some of the new discoveries yield new medicines or medical techniques
such as the abundantly awarded cancer pen recently developed by my daughter olivia
others give engineers new ideas for inventions in the burgeoning field of biometrics still others
have no immediate practical application they're just revelations of beautiful biological ingenuity
scientific discovery for its own sake all of this new knowledge is exhilarating in its own right
at the same time i am now convinced that many of these discoveries taken together
point beyond themselves to something even more extraordinary
this new age of discovery is revealing a myriad of artful solutions to major engineering challenges
solutions that for all the world appear to require something that matter alone lacks
i will put this as plainly as i can this rush of discovery seems to point beyond
a purely blind evolutionary process to the workings of an attribute unique to minds
foresight . yes i know he says : we've been told that it's out of bounds for science to go there
we would take up that claim in subsequent chapters but regardless of where you ultimately land on the
question of what conclusions science should or shouldn't allow and whether or not you ultimately
affirm that this gold rush of new evidence points to the workings of foresight i urge you to inspect
the evidence curiosity may have killed the cat but it's done wonders for the scientific enterprise
the many and ingenious examples in covered in recent years are so numerous that they could
fill many large volumes the pages that follow highlight only a small fraction of the total
but that fraction is filled with marvels we'll look at everything from insect gears
and power punching shrimp to carnivorous plants and a protein machine in the eye that may harvest
quantum entanglement allowing birds to see earth's magnetic field . so this book is full of
these extraordinary examples . i will put a link in the description below to
something i discovered as a layman and these are called molecular machines , these are incredible
pieces of high-tech machinery that exist in biology within the cells building blocks of cells
and you can actually see them now and these look all the world to me like highly sophisticated
marvels of engineering that are supposedly the random blind products and materialist chants
that i didn't think they are at all they certainly appeal like that to me so let me just mention
beginning of a few chapters just the preamble which i find quite interesting the code of life
chapter three : the cell has its own sophisticated information processing system much like a computer
computer programs require programmers conscious agents with knowledge and foresight
who can code the needed instructions in the right sequence to generate a functioning and information
rich program is there any reason to think that the information in cells also was programmed by
a programmer rather than random processes let's delve into the details they consider our options
and then he talks about foresight in dna the cell's genetic information
so that's a very interesting chapter which i mentioned a little bit of
and then in chapter six : a case study in foresight birds the living world manifests
numerous engineering solutions combined with ingenious chemistry far beyond the reach of
unguided evolutionary mechanisms . so darwinism here just fails to account for the extraordinary
complexity and foresight we see everywhere in nature and this is something we've only discovered
recently because of technological advance a particularly striking example birds there are
many aspects of bird biochemistry and architecture we could focus on suggestive of foresight planning
and marvelous ingenuity here we will focus on just two aspects bird navigation and bird reproduction
and then he talks about the birds gps system so this is where birds can travel incredible
distances with changing landscapes without getting lost they have their own built-in
gps system which is incredibly sophisticated piece of technology so he discusses that in chapter six
and then in chapter nine , this will be the last thing i read i think . he talks about
the future of science , foresight in the future of science : time for a quick recap and then let's
step back and consider the implications of the evidence in these pages for the future of science
the development of a chick embryo is a wonder to behold
and you can actually behold it because scientists have filmed the process but no lesser wonder than
the developing embryo is the egg in which it develops the egg yolk and egg white contain all
the food a chick will need before it hatches the eggshell also contains microscopic pores
that let air in so the check can breathe i didn't know that the developing bird then
generates a network of capillaries to absorb oxygen from the air and release carbon dioxide
just before hatching special membranes in the egg trap enough air so the full grown chick can take
its first breath before it leaves the shell , the eggshell is hard enough to protect the developing
chick yet fragile enough for the full grown chick to peck its way out indeed the eggs contents
and shell are masterpieces of engineering that both nourish and protect the baby bird
but there will be no egg without a chicken to produce it without an egg there can be no chicken
but without a chicken there could be no egg it's the original chicken and egg problem
the archetypal example of a most curious causal circularity to get A , we need B but to
get B we first need A . we can't have one without the other to get both together we need foresight
so we find examples of this causal circularity and thus the need for foresight
throughout living systems as we have seen living cells need membranes no membranes no life
and not just no membranes but membranes with a myriad of and then he goes into a complex
scientific explanation basically you need foresight to get the whole process going so
yep . so there we go , i do recommend this book if you're interested in intelligent design
and i think it is the future of science because new scientific discoveries all the time i think
are undermining and subverting the old materialist paradigm and we need a paradigm shift that opens
up our world view not just in science but in philosophy which is more my area as well in
the philosophy of mind to allow for consciousness basically i'm an idealist
i believe that ultimately consciousness is the fundamental reality and from consciousness we get
as we get the physical world that we see around us . i'll leave a link to the book below and
i do recommend you watch the video on these biological machines they're most extraordinary
they certainly opened up my mind when i first came across them a year or two ago . until next time