Renowned writer and Yale University professor David Gelernter has turned away from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, arguing that it has too many holes and has aged out as a probable scientific theory.
The professor also argued that intelligent design is a serious theory that cannot be shooed away by anti-religious sentiment. Furthermore, he lamented the lack of "free speech" concerning theories outside of Darwinism, which has become a "religion" to many academics spanning the various scientific fields.
As highlighted by Rachel Alexander at The Stream, Gelernter outlined his rejection of Darwinian thought in an essay published in the Claremont Review of Books, aptly titled, "Giving up Darwin."
"Darwin's theory predicts that new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life," the professor says in the paper. "Those brave new Cambrian creatures must therefore have had Precambrian predecessors, similar but not quite as fancy and sophisticated. They could not have all blown out suddenly, like a bunch of geysers." He explains, "Each must have had a closely related predecessor, which must have had its own predecessors."
Among many other reasons, Gelernter also points to the near impossibility of creating a functional stable protein. "Immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is so far a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million you fail. The odds bury you. It can't be done."
Though he doesn't personally subscribe to the theory of intelligent design, Gelernter said it is an "absolutely serious argument," noting that it is the "first, and obviously most intuitive [theory] that comes to mind," Alexander noted.
quote:David Hillel Gelernter (born March 5, 1955)[1] is an American artist, writer, and professor of computer science at Yale University. He is a former national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior fellow in Jewish thought at the Shalem Center, and sat on the National Endowment for the Arts. He publishes widely; his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, The Weekly Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and elsewhere. His paintings have been exhibited in New Haven and Manhattan.
Computer science is not biology (he even says he is not a biologist in the video), and math cannot change reality.
There are a number of PRATTS (points refuted a thousand times) in the video, and the monitor, Peter Robinson, has no apparent knowledge of biology either. Other participants are David Berlinski and Steven Meyer, both of the Discovery Institute.