1. Order out of chaos, I. Prigogine
2. Gaia, J. Lovelock
3. The web of life, F. Capra
4. some of L. Margulis's books (she is the author of the theory of intracellular symbiosis)

Gert Korthof,

I would like to express appreciation for the excellent web site you are maintaining. Pointing visitors toward substative texts in a fair way on such a contentious issue is a great public service. I have some comments on Tippler, and on the alternatives to evolution.

You express uncertainty about Tippler's convictions, based on the book you reviewed. I have a copy of another book by him, The Physics of Immortality, which lays out his beliefs clearly. If life colonizes the whole universe, and the universe has a Big Crunch, then life can force the Crunch to a pancake shape, providing tremendous free energy through gravitational shear. As the Universe approaches the singularity, the free energy will aproach infinity. The plasma/software based life forms which will have long ago replaced us will approach infinity in power and intelligence (and time, as software based life experinces time by software clock cycle, and with infinite energy the clock cycle times could become infinitely small). Somehow, the necessity of their existence has called this universe which will spawn them into being. The book is interesting, and gets into the mechanics of how all this could take place. Tippler's motivation is to find a physical route to immortality of life.

In general, I think the references in your web disprove Darwinian evolution. Both Behe's irreducible complexity point and the stability/replacement of fossil forms show that small-step neo-Darwinian evolution could not have taken place. The lack of any coherent theory to achieve puntuated equilibrium and the simultaneous development of complementary enzymes is not fatal, but definitely hurts evolution. The weakness of the rebuttals of the specificity problem for early earth protiens (Hoyle didn't account for known allowable variants -- this only increases the probability by a few orders of magnitude, when he showed improbabilities of hundreds of orders), the failure of early earth experiments to generate the ingredients of the hypothesised soup, and lack of any theory for getting an RNA inside a membrane & taking control of it's metabolism all should be fatal.

The reason it has not been, you have pointed out yourself. I also found it stated explicitly in Climbing Mount Improbable, Consiousness Explained, and A Brief history of Time. There is not a coherent alternative. Theism, as defended by Swinburne, is an alternative, but the more general alternative is dualism. Although most people believe in dualism (every one of us experiences a strong case for it every waking moment), there are almost no philosophers publishing even the basic assumptions of a dualist metaphysics. Without any philosophical base, it is no surprise that virtually no scientific work is being done on dualist biology or dualist physics. The only reference I have found is in psyco-biology, The Mind and Its Brain by Popper and Eccles (Vitalism was a dualist biology, but I do not believe it has any published advocates for over half a century).

Dawkins, Dennett, and Hawkins all claim that there is no science which can be done if they abandon the assumtion of physicalism. Behe and other Design or Creation advocates support this claim, by failing to apply the scientific method to their solutions to the problems of evolution. But the tools of analytic philosophy and of science can be used on dualist claims. Swinburne attempts to do so, with the Hypothesis of Theism. I believe that it is the obligation of every scientist who notices the implausibility of abiogenesis, the illogic of consciousness being self-deception, and the ad-hoc nature of assumptions on the universe's origin (Occom's Razor is designed for just the sort of beast as imaginary time), to start seriously considering what a dualist alternative would look like.

You seem to still be a committed evolutionist, despite what you have read critiqueing the theory. Is that because of the lack of alternatives? That is my understanding, based on your praise for the non-Darwinian attempts to build an evolutionary theory (that a Scientist tries to construct a new theory when he/she finds a hole, where Creationists just abandon reason & assume God). Have you considered following Swinburne & Eccles, & trying to apply science to the alternative?

I hope this mailing has been interesting or useful to you. Your page has been both to me, and I will order several of the books mentioned which I had not heard of before.

Appreciatively
Dave Cleveland