Intelligent Design vs. Casino Universe

One problem the creationists or non-dualists might be interested in, concerns the fact that DNA needs to be switched on by a regulatory protein in order for a Gene to be expressed... but the regulatory protein needs to be coded for by the DNA and therefore needs a regulatory protein to switch it on... one it seems, will always be left with the problem of either a chicken and egg scenario or an infinite regress... this problem seems unsolvable.

How can the need for a regulatory protein needing a prior regulatory protein ever be solved? If it can't, then how it works will remain a mystery which may as well be solved by there being a God involved or magic or reality isn't what it seems (I go with the last one) and biology is a mystery that we can tinker with without being able to fundamentally understand it.

What do you think fm?

Response to the Cartesian method

As he relates in his autobiography, Vico returned to Naples from Vatolla to find "the physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters." Developments in both metaphysics and the natural sciences abounded as the result of Cartesianism. Widely disseminated by the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Descartes' method was rooted in verification: the only path to truth, and thus knowledge, was through axioms derived from observation. Descartes' insistence that the "sure and indubitable" (or, "clear and distinct") should form the basis of reasoning had an obvious impact on the prevailing views of logic and discourse. Studies in rhetoric – indeed all studies concerned with civic discourse and the realm of probable truths – met with increasing disdain.

Vico's humanism and professional concerns prompted an obvious response that he would develop throughout the course of his writings: the realms of verifiable truth and human concern share only a slight overlap, yet reasoning is required in equal measure in both spheres. One of the clearest and earliest forms of this argument is available in the De Italorum Sapientia, where Vico argues that

to introduce geometrical method into practical life is "like trying to go mad .with the rules of reason," attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, as though human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance. Similarly, to arrange a political speech according to the precepts of geometrical method is equivalent to stripping it of any acute remarks and to uttering nothing but pedestrian lines of argument.

Vico's position here and in later works is not that the Cartesian method is irrelevant, but that its application cannot be extended to the civic sphere. Instead of confining reason to a string of verifiable axioms, Vico suggests (along with the ancients) that appeals to phronêsis or practical wisdom must also be made, as do appeals to the various components of persuasion that comprise rhetoric. Vico would reproduce this argument consistently throughout his works, and would use it as a central tenet of the Scienza Nuova.

The more you know about monarch butterflies, the more extraordinary they seem. Their life cycle — the adaptive web of behaviors they have evolved — is almost unbelievably complex. They migrate en masse from all across the Midwest and Northeast to just a few high altitude sites in Mexico, where they winter, sheltering in profusion beneath a canopy of fir trees, from whose trunks they draw the residual heat they need to stay alive. Winter past, they migrate thousands of miles northward, where they lay their eggs on milkweed plants, the only plant a monarch caterpillar can eat.


The complexity of their life cycle is mirrored by the complexity of the threats they face. For the past 15 years, scientists have been watching monarch numbers plummet, as much as 81 percent between 1999 and 2010. They reached nearly catastrophic lows in the winter of 2009-2010 and have barely recovered since.

One recent study suggests that the long-term survival of the species may be in doubt. A few weeks ago, one of the scientists devoted to studying monarchs, Ernest Williams at Hamilton College, summarized for me the threats that have been reported in recent studies.

Nearly every link in the monarchs’ chain of being, he said, is at risk. Illegal logging in Mexico has reduced their winter habitat — an already vanishingly small area, which is itself being altered by the warming climate. Ecotourists who come to witness the congregation of so many butterflies disturb the creatures they have come to see. But perhaps most damaging is the demise of milkweed.

Monarchs have the misfortune to rely exclusively on a plant that farmers all across the Midwest and Northeast consider a weed. There is a direct parallel between the demise of milkweeds — killed by the herbicide glyphosate, which is sprayed by the millions of gallons on fields where genetically modified crops are growing — and the steady drop in monarch numbers.

To anyone who has grown up in the Midwest, the result seems very strange. After decades of trying to eradicate milkweed, gardeners are being encouraged to plant it in their gardens, and townships and counties are being asked to let it thrive in the roadside ditches. What looks like agricultural success, purging bean and corn fields of milkweed (among other weeds), turns out to be butterfly disaster. This is the great puzzle of species conservation — it has to be effective at nearly every stage of a species’ life cycle. And this, too, is the dilemma of human behavior. We live in a world of unintended consequences of our own making, which can never be easily undone

Because they already know what the phrase actually means, you obviously don't.

Have anything to add to the discussion?