from OpenSeti Website
 

In recent years, the unoccupied intellectual middle ground between evolutionary science and creationism has begun to fill from both directions. Evolutionists have spawned astrobiology and varieties of panspermia, in which organic compounds (mainstream version) or even whole cells (modern or "strong" panspermia per Hoyle and Wickramasinghe) fall to Earth after riding on cosmic detritus. Creationists have found greater academic acceptance by dropping all reference to the "creator" but retaining the function of Intelligent Design. And new theories of evolution are ready to embrace teleological mechanisms embedded in the DNA molecule.

Something had to be done. "Evolution" has failed in two major ways. First, as a scientific discipline, it has been guilty of selecting its very data to support its favored hypothesis. If this seems difficult to believe, take the time to review the massive Forbidden Archaeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race (Cremo and Thompson, 1994). A highly condensed and updated summary of this book is found in Human Devolution (Cremo, 2003), Chapter 2. Whereas, officially, anatomically modern humans appeared on the scene about 100,000 years ago, these books present a great deal of documented evidence of the existence of modern humans on this planet going back hundreds of millions of years. This evidence has been systematically and even ruthlessly blocked and purged from the scientific literature.

Chapter 3 of Human Devolution also treats the evidence for extreme antiquity of nonhuman species, "showing that flowering plants and insects existed on earth far earlier than most Darwinists now believe possible."

These data are quite inconsistent with the standard picture of step-by-step evolution.
 

And that is the first major failure of evolution: it is a theory designed to explain a body of evidence that does not even represent a valid picture of the fossil data.

Evolution’s second major failure is that it does not even explain the body of data that it has selected. It is illogical and is riddled with glaring flaws. This has long been pointed out without any resort to religious scriptures or "revealed" knowledge. See, for example, the review by UC Berkeley Law Professor Phillip Johnson (1993), and the devastating arguments of Lloyd Pye in his Essay on Carpenter Genes. As Pye explains, evolution cannot occur through random mutations because a viable mutation would require synchronized changes in genes from BOTH the father and the mother.

"The scientific disciplines that were part of the evolutionary synthesis are all nonmolecular. Yet for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life."
- Prof. of Biochemistry Michael Behe
Lehigh University

Michael Behe (1996) completely undercuts the Darwinists by demonstrating that they have been working on the wrong level ever since Darwin made his scientific observations, and even the neo-Darwinist reorganization of evolution science in the 1950s missed the boat entirely: evolution, if it occurred at all, would have to take place on the molecular levels of biochemistry, not the macroscopic level of organs and other body structures - and biochemistry itself did not exist as a branch of science until after neo-Darwinism had been launched.

Furthermore, neo-Darwinists have never even until now taken much account of the biomolecular foundations of biological life.

For example, the "simple" structures known as cilia and flagella, used by cells in swimming and moving liquids, have been the subject of thousands of scientific papers, but there is hardly one that attempts to explain how they could have evolved. That is because they, like virtually all life forms, have an incredibly complex microbiological structure, and it is in this structure that random mutation and natural selection would have had to take place.

Here Behe introduces his concept of "irreducible complexity", asserting that the molecular structures he describes simply could not work if any part of them were missing or even imperfect in its design.

Today, evolution hasn’t a leg to stand on. Evolutionists haven’t admitted it yet. And for good reason: the stakes are very high. Evolution remains the ground on which many biological and life sciences stand; biologists and other scientists feel it must be defended not only on behalf of their various fields but also to prevent the Bible-thumpers and the promoters of the supernatural from storming in -- a fearful prospect indeed. But Intelligent Design (ID), as argued by Behe and colleagues, is not necessarily creationism. It has no preconceptions as to who or what the designer might be.

Can it truly be so? What about all those depictions of man’s descent from hominid ancestors we’ve seen in our school textbooks since childhood, and the well-researched evolution of the modern horse from eohippus, the development of vertebrates, and all these things that we know our life scientists know?"

It is argued by some in the ID movement that these evolutionary sequences are actually fictions. Berkeley-educated biologist Jonathan Wells (2000), calls these images and depictions Icons of Evolution. His book is devoted to showing that each and every one of them is a deliberate deception.

A useful resource for those interested in learning more about ID would be the anthology Mere Creation, a collection of investigations by nineteen expert academics in wide ranging fields, edited by William Dembski (1998). 25

Publications pro and con the concept of ID continue to appear at a lively rate. The Book Review section of the Journal of Scientific Exploration Spring 2003 issue contains critiques of several new books in the field. A scan of this material leads to the general impression that ID advocates do tend to have a creationist agenda but have dressed up their subject to make a better impression in polite company. On the other hand, some of their critics seem to object on the ground that their own religious ideas are offended by ID.

Since ID does not explicitly identify the designer, the framework supports the cause of the old-style creationists. But advocates of the notion of Earth colonization by ETI are also within the scope. But - setting aside for the moment the obvious question of who designed ETI - new concepts of intelligence in nature have come onto the scene. In their Gaia Hypothesis, for example, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis had all the Earth’s species, by means of their biological activity, engineering their environment so as to advance "evolution". And they do this according to a sort of vast wisdom intrinsic to the Earth - Gaia - herself and all of her species. The actual locus of the wisdom or intelligence was not given, and in fact was suggested to be distributed.

In his Cosmic Ancestry theory, Brig Klyce combines strong panspermia with the teleological aspects of the Gaia Hypothesis, to propose that evolution on Earth depends on genetic programs that come from space. Quoting from his website’s Introduction:

Cosmic Ancestry implies, we find, that life can only descend from ancestors that were at least as highly evolved as itself. And it means, we believe, that there can be no origin of life from nonliving matter in the finite past. Without supernatural intervention, therefore, we conclude that life must have always existed. Evidence for Cosmic Ancestry, in the form of fossilized microscopic life found in meteorites, is accumulating rapidly.

Evidence of a strikingly different kind is provided by Jeremy Narby (1998). While conducting what might be called "experiential anthropological studies" with South American native cultures, Narby found that certain plants having physical forms resembling the DNA molecule, when eaten, actually bring the experiencer into direct contact and conversation with intelligent serpent forms who claim to BE DNA, and who tell stories of how they arrived here by journeying through space. Narby received this information without foreknowledge that the native people using those plants had long been given the same information.

Now we have Rhawn Joseph (2001) who offers in his Astrobiology, the Origin of Life, and the Death of Darwinism a detailed and breathtaking theory of how DNA achieves its incredible work. His Evolutionary Metamorphosis thesis in a nutshell:

"The genetic seeds of life swarm throughout the cosmos, and some of these genetic "seeds" fell to Earth, as well as on other planets. And these genetic "seeds" contained the instructions for the metamorphosis of all life, including woman and man.

"DNA acts to purposefully modify the environment, which acts on gene selection, so as to fulfill specific genetic goals: the dispersal and activation of silent DNA and the replication of life forms that long ago lived on other planets."

In his model, the "seeds" contain the entire programmed evolutionary sequence that leads to human and beyond. I take the liberty of listing for you the points of Joseph’s thesis given in his Foreward [sic]:

1)   The age and origin of the universe is unknown.

2)   Life first originated on other planets, perhaps tens of billions or even trillions upon trillions of years ago.

3)   DNA is capable of learning, remembering, and acting intelligently.

4)   Cosmic collisions are commonplace, not only between meteors and planets, but between entire galaxies.

5)   The seeds of life swarm throughout the cosmos and living creatures contained in planetary debris have been repeatedly hurtled to other worlds.

6)   These creatures and their DNA then labored to alter the environment of these worlds so as to engineer their own evolution.

7)   Creatures cast upon planets already swarming with life may have swapped DNA thus increasing their genetic storehouse of genetic information.

8)   The first creatures on Earth (and their DNA), came from other planets.

9)   DNA acts on and modifies the environment.

10) The modified environment acts on gene selection to activate "silent" genes and "silent" genetic traits which exist a priori.

11) Silent genes can be passed down to subsequent generations and to diverging species.

12) Once the environment is sufficiently engineered, these silent genes and the traits they code for may be expressed in distinct and separate species.

13) Genes can also be transferred laterally and horizontally between species, so that different species can come to possess the same gene and the same trait.

14) As these "silent" genes/ traits are inherited and were passed down from ancestral species, then these genes and traits must have been inherited from creatures that "evolved" on other planets.

15) Genetic evidence indicates that evolution has progressed in a highly predictable "molecular clock-like" fashion.

16) The progressive "evolution" of increasingly complex and intelligent species in a step-wise progressive fashion, and genetic evidence as reported by the human genome project, indicates that "evolution" has unfolded in accordance with specific and highly regulated genetic instructions.

17) Conclusion: DNA acts to modify the environment to engineer its own evolution and the activation of traits and genes which exist a priori; i.e. "evolutionary metamorphosis."

Cosmic Ancestry and Evolutionary Metamorphosis do not explain the ultimate source of life in the universe. However, they push it back into the indefinitely deep past, and enable life to propagate from a single beginning somewhere in the near-infinite cosmos. In this, these theories provide the time and space for the infinitely improbable to actually happen. They further provide the means for genetically engineering worlds in their multitude by building the instructions into the single DNA molecule.

Who might have accomplished this?