Jeremy L. England works in the Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before potentially scaring people by daring to imagine questioning Darwinism (random chance forbid!), note that England stated:
I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong.
Well, now I can sleep at night. He followed with:
On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.
His paper Statistical physics of self-replication (published online 21 August 2013 AD) and the online response to it demonstrates just how philosophical scientists are. Note the reference to ideas (as in those which combine to form worldviews; such as Darwinian evolution which is a philosophical worldview versus biology which is a science).
Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard:
I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong.
Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health
Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across. I was struck by the originality of the ideas.
Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University
Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising…
But Shakhnovich adds a “but”:
… but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena.
Thus, great idea! But extremely speculative, especially as applied to the very point of the issue at hand—thus far.
England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven.
Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University
He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp. I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.
Do you discern the philosophy? His ideas are making people think and rethink and they can they begin interpreting evidence in accordance to a slightly modified Darwinian worldview philosophy.
The bottom line point seems to be that Jeremy L. England is yet another of so very many potentially brilliant scientists who will throw their careers away due to choosing to not do science but rather, abuse science by using it a as a tool to disprove God.
England stated the following:
You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.
It is certainly not a difficult experiment to 1) start with a random clump of atoms, 2) shine light on it for long enough (whatever that means) and 3) see whether a plant results.
He does not seem to consider that a plant is the result of programming so that if he does not begin with the right atoms, he can shine a light on the atoms until a cow results and comes home but he will not get a plant.
And to see just how brilliant his ideas, and methodology, are, note what England writes this within Statistical physics of self-replication:
In order to do so, we first suppose there is some coarse-grained, observable condition I in the system, such as the criterion “The system contains precisely one healthy, exponential-growth-phase bacterium at the start of a round of cell division.”
Do you see how the cards are stacked? “first,” as in beginning with (“at the start”) we “suppose” guess, assert, presuppose, etc. that “there is” as in assuming to already exist (“at the start”), “one healthy, exponential-growth-phase bacterium at the start of a round of cell division” a fully functioning organism with all necessarily required information driven functions in already in place.
In other words, if you assume that in some unknown, unobserved, unexplained, un-reproducibly experimented upon—believed by pure “faith”—the existence of a bacteria that contains cells that can divide then, by golly, it can already divide and will keep dividing.
Note that he has other suppositions, “Suppose now that we let some time interval…Thus, let us suppose there is a simple selfreplicator living at inverse temperature.”
He also employs a set of other assumptions:
…we assume that a decay event mediated…
It is reasonable to assume that the reverse of this reaction…
…we can also assume in this case that the change in internal entropy…
We can assume furthermore that the cell is in exponential growth phase at the beginning of its division cycle…
…as we have assumed this cell is growing processively…
…we assume a cell division time of 20 min…
On and on it goes. If we guess at many key points then we can actually begin with a conclusion and conclude that, by golly, we were right!
Thank Darwinism that we have such brilliant minds that can explain to us that if we start with self-replication we end up with self-replication.
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