Is Stuart Kauffman secular creationist?

Stuart Kauffman has long been preaching the efficacy of self-organization to make up for the general lack of efficacy of natural selection to explain functional complexity.  In his case, he generally isn't always accused of being a secular creationist.  Since the growing demand for an Extended Synthesis (since the "Modern Synthesis" is finally faring poorly in the public eye) since the Altenberg 16 turning point, it is getting hard to even fault Kauffman for pointing out the elephant in the room.

From p. 150 of Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe:

Is the "canon of selection" the "quintessential statement" about a lack of purpose behind human existence because it is really difficult to .  Kauffman seems to be implying elsewhere that a new canon needs to .   It seems like nearly half the serious thinkers are relegating selection to a minor role; even though the Prime Suspect for the crime of accidental design probably is not guilty, and no one can agree on what combination of the milieu of evolutionary causes is responsible for the functional complexity of life, there seems to be 98% agreement on one thing, it must be an accident.  Kauffman is one of the definitive majority here and he goes on to explain why in the next few paragraphs:  The order in life must be accidental because biology is so woefully unpredictable.  Biologists are so often thrown for a loop that it can't be design.  Sounds more to me like biology does not investigate laws in the sense that physics  does, but that it investigates a perpetually clever technology, a technology for which it has become dogma to posit a mysterious origin in some law-like process--the orthodox version having selection as the central engine in that process. They can't agree on how such a process works, only that it has somehow worked and this theory that it has somehow is as well established as the theory of gravitation.

This is rather like somebody having been sent to prison by the unanimous vote of jurors who believe incompatible versions (based on incompatible evidence) of how the defendant Q committed the crime.   They all agree that he must be guilty (due to there not being any preferable suspect) but there is not much agreement beyond that point.  Juror #1 believes in scenario A because fact X makes scenarios B and C implausible; juror #2 holds to scenario B because fact Y makes scenarios A and C implausible; and juror #3 is certain that scenario C is correct because fact Z makes A and B ludicrous.  But they can join arms and say they are assured of defendant Q's guilt because someone's version must be correct.  It must be correct because if facts X, Y, & Z rule out A, B, & C, then that means that we're back to square one and the real criminal is still out there, and that is a justice-stopper, ladies and gentleman.

Galton on the nature of invention

Also from Galton's Natural Inheritance:

An apparent ground for the common belief [in gradualism] is founded on the fact that whenever search is made for intermediate forms between widely divergent varieties,

whether they be of plants or of animals, of weapons or utensils, of customs, religion or language, or of any other product of evolution, a long and orderly series can usually be made out, each member of which differs in an almost imperceptible degree from the adjacent specimens. But it does not at all follow because these intermediate forms have been found to exist, that they are the very stages that were passed through in the course of evolution. Counter evidence exists in abundance, not only of the appearance of considerable sports, but of their remarkable stability in hereditary transmission. Many of the specimens of intermediate forms may have been unstable varieties, whose descendants had reverted; they might be looked upon as tentative and faltering steps taken along parallel courses of evolution, and afterwards retraced.  Affiliation from each generation to the next requires to be proved before any apparent line of descent can be accepted as the true one. The history of inventions fully illustrates this view. It is a most common experience that what an inventor knew to be original, and believed to be new, had been invented independently by others many times before, but had never become established.  Even when it has new features, the inventor usually finds, on consulting lists of patents, that other inventions closely border on his own. Yet we know that inventors often proceed by strides, their ideas originating in some sudden happy thought suggested by a chance occurrence, though their crude ideas may have to be laboriously worked out afterwards. If, however, all the varieties of any machine that had ever been invented, were collected and arranged in a Museum in the apparent order of their Evolution, each would differ so little from its neighbour as to suggest the fallacious inference that the successive inventors of that machine had progressed by means of a very large number of hardly discernible steps.

If that is a "fallacious inference" then how is any lineage inferred?

Evolution as Invention by Galton

Darwin's cousin Francis Galton discussed the innovative power of Natural Selection in his classic Natural Inheritance:

The hansom cab was originally a marvellous novelty. In the language of breeders it was a sudden and remarkable "sport," yet the suddenness of its appearance has been no bar to its unchanging hold on popular favour. It is not a monstrous anomaly of incongruous parts, and therefore unstable, but quite the contrary. Many other instances of very novel and yet stable inventions could be quoted. One of the earliest electrical batteries was that which is still known as a Grove battery, being the invention of Sir William Grove. Its principle was quite new at the time, and it continues in use without alteration.  . . . It seems to me that stability of type, about which we as yet know very little, must be an important factor in the general theory of heredity, when the theory is applied to cases of high breeding. . . .
Infertility of Mixed Types.--It is not difficult to see in a general way why very different types should refuse to coalesce, and it is scarcely possible to explain the reason why, more clearly than by an illustration. Thus a useful blend between a four-wheeler and a hansom would be impossible ; it would have to run on three wheels and the half-way position for the driver would be upon its roof. A blend would be equally impossible between an omnibus and a hansom, and it would be difficult between an omnibus and a four-wheeler .* [emphases mine]

Strangely, the copy of Galton's Natural Inheritance available in PDF form at archive.org is from Harvard's divinity school of all places.  The college's library stamp represents the testament of Christian scripture as an open book, with Psalm 119:169 cited on the left side and John 17:17 cited on the other.  The Hebrew words of the Psalm say "in Your word give me understanding," and the Greek words from the Gospel say "Your word is truth."

Deter Lucem Defends Hawking's Self-Birthing Universe

Suppose you ask a college professor, "Where does a baby come from?  How does a baby come to form in the womb?"

The professor says that there is a biological law of development that causes an ovum to develop into a baby and that this law requires an ovum to create itself from nothing.  You say that this sounds circular as though a baby comes to be because its potential existence makes it somehow necessary.  The professor sighs and tells you that you misunderstand him: The internal characteristics of the early embryo is what leads to the embryo existing; the existence of an embryo is inevitable based off of a bunch of different criteria that exist before the embryo really starts to expand into existence. 

Surely you would gather that this professor is either engaged in sophistry or has no idea just how logically unsound his reasoning is.  What I want to look at here is what happens when a physicist tries to turn cosmology into a universe-creating perpetual motion machine, and then laymen attempt to defend such reasoning.

Stephen Hawking has a knack for taking science and doing a whole lot of questionable philosophy beyond it (see bottom of this post), in spite of his sometimes dismissive attitude toward philosophy.  A particularly quotable example was brought to the spotlight in the 2015 Christian film God's Not Dead:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.  

The film is staged around several fictional presentations in which a college student is making a case for the existence of a Creator to an atheist professor's philosophy class.  The student Josh interprets Hawking's words thus:

Hawking is basically saying that the universe exists because the universe needed to exist, and because the universe needed to exist, it therefore created itself. 

Now, the original statement by Hawking is that there exists something (the law of gravity--which is inside or outside the universe?) that explains the necessity for and therefore the existence of the universe.  Like the Logos in the Gospel of John, gravity plays for Hawking the role of Firstborn of all Creation, eternal and present "in the beginning."

Amateur Darwinism apologist Deterlucem spends an entire Youtube webisode taking on these fictional arguments in the film, and takes issue with the above as though the character Josh is stating that Hawking means the form of our present universe was foreordained in "some cosmic plan."  Instead, Deter impatiently explains Stephen Hawking's assertion that the law of gravity requires the universe to spontaneously create itself from nothing:  

It's like I mentioned twice now, the internal characteristics of the early universe is what led to the universe existing--it's meaning [sic] the existence of the present universe was inevitable based off of a bunch of different criteria existing before the universe really started to expand into existence. 

"Expand into existence"?  Expanding from non-existence?  Now, even if we accept the law of gravity deterministically getting us from a pre-inflation early universe to the present universe with no speculative baggage (a big "if"), that process doesn't explain how we get the pre-inflation early universe "from nothing."  It's not clear that Deter has thought about his own words enough to know himself what he means by them.  This cosmic "just so" story sounds like a creation myth:

In the beginning was Nothing, and the Nothing expanded four-dimensionally into Something because of the Criteria, and Gravity caused the Criteria to hyperinflate the new Something into an immense universe of mass and energy, which through Cosmic Evolution eventually became the universe we see now.

What Deter has presented is something that Daniel Dennet calls a "deepity."  In its sensible, obvious interpretation (in this case, that the outcome of a deterministic process is explained by initial conditions), its meaning is trivial and irrelevant.  In its non-trivial sense (in this case, that a thing's early state explains how it came to be in that early state), it is absurd.  He does this through what Daniel Dennet calls "rathering."  Rather than an inevitable universe in the sense of being planned, laws like gravity endow a Nothing with awesome self-starting, universe-becoming powers.  Because Science.  This is one of those ideas that are so absurd that only intellectuals could believe them.  It is the intellectual version of the explanation for electrolytes in Idiocracy (note: Brawndo is something like Gatorade).

William Dembski points out the philosophical problems with Hawking's theological and causal interpretations of early universe 4-dimensional space as timeless and non-causal in several pages of the anthology Mere Creation.  

Lawrence Krauss is only slightly more nuanced when he explains that "nothing" is an unstable something.  If you have a "nothing" all by itself without matter or energy, it starts quivering and explodes into an enormous universe.  G.K. Chesterton once compared materialism to schizophrenia: both are characterized by reason without sense.  When reason is all by itself without sense, it starts quivering and explodes into a cosmological fantasy.  ". . . [T]he materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts."*

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. . . . The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.  
- Chesterton*

Local Fitness Landscape Mapped Out for Green Fluorescent Protein

Sharp peaks.


Cornelius Hunter quotes a recent article in Nature about GFP:

We were really surprised when we finally had a chance to look at exactly how the interactions between mutations occur. We also did not expect that almost all the mutations that are only slightly damaging on their own can destroy fluorescence completely when combined together.*

Quasispecies: Trapped in Sequence Space

Edward C. Holmes and Andre´s Moya make some interesting comments in "Is the Quasispecies Concept Relevant to RNA Viruses?" JOURNAL OF VIROLOGY, Vol. 76, No. 1, Jan. 2002, p. 460–462:

Unlimited Variation: The Dark Energy of Biology

 

Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote in 1858 that his theory could be summarized as “indefinite departure from the original type.” “Indefinite departure” is in fact the central claim of the theory of evolution by natural selection. But it still hasn’t been observed. Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne and others keep trying to bully us into accepting that it is a “fact.” OK. Maybe it is. So give us the evidence. We have to read their books carefully to realize how meager it is. They still haven’t shown us that extrapolation.

Back in 2013 Tom Bethell wrote an interesting piece about the "central claim" of modern evolutionary theory.  As with many interesting articles of this nature, my attention was drawn to it by a caustic review by a renowned ID-hater, in this case the inimitable Jeffrey Shallit. 

Shallit pedantically quibbles about Bethell's criticism of Charles Darwin.  Darwin stated that there was no reason to suppose any limit to variations of forms, e.g. no reason a fish couldn't become an elephant through a long enough series of minuscule changes, which casts natural selection as Dr. Moreau's scalpel working at a geological pace. This has enormous relevance to the extrapolative nature of evolutionary theory, for it is the justification for what Wallace called (as Bethell points out) "indefinite departure from the original type." By "indefinite" Wallace meant that for practical purposes it can be considered infinite, the limits being so indefinitely far out as to not rule out any connection between the varied forms we see and the simplest cell.

It is this sense of extrapolation that is central to evolutionary theory, more so than either common descent or natural selection. 

In a particularly Dawkins-esque stroke, Shallit pounds the pulpit:

What we do see is evolution taking place today, and we have the fossil record that shows the changes in the past. You have to be particularly dense or dishonest to deny this.

In other words, we already know that any limits to variation don't matter to macroevolutionary theory, because macroevolution must have occurred.  We have these here fossils, and we know Mr. Darwin's speculations about them must be true because we observe limited variation now.  Accept the extrapolation or be denounced as a "denier"! Shallit and his audience stand ready to punish the deniers by pointing and laughing while simultaneous shaking their fists in furious rage. 

Shallit invokes speciation.  I'm not certain if everyone would agree on his instances of speciation (none of which he offers--it is left as an exercise to the reader), but perhaps he would be surprised to know that even most "Young Earth" creationists believe in some limited form of speciation.  In spite of considering himself an expert on pseudo-science, he doesn't even understand the nature of his favorite "pseudoscientific" bugbear, Young Earth Creationism.  He might also be unaware that even though undirected speciation may be necessary for macroevolution, it is not sufficient to explain macroevolution.  In fact, Cornelius Hunter, who is not a Young Earth creationist, does not deny ultra-fast adaptation or an old age of fossils.  Shallit seems to consider him a run-of-the-mill creationist.  It seems that Shallit does not recognize any significant differences among those he considers "creationists" (which for him includes ID advocates).    

All of this is probably lost on evolutionary materialists who depend on a quasi-Newtonian metaphor in which evolution is moving with a sort of inertia.  This is why Jerry Coyne can liken macroevolution to a train in motion (though it is also an artificially powered and directed machine) and Shallit can compare it to cosmological materials flying apart.  (Although, the hypothetical drive powering the quasi-infinite variation of evolution is, in epistemological status, somewhat reminiscent of poorly understood "dark energy.")  

As natural as a train in motion...  Give this choo-choo
enough time and it just might reach the Galapagos Islands.