I think what CTD is trying to do here is invalidate natural selection by showing that some species have the potential to self-regulate.

Before I say anything else, I want to emphasise that the evidence for evolution is clear. Life has changed since it appeared on earth and the fossil record validates this, as do many branches of science. What's more, when scientists disagree on the subject, what they disagree about is the mechanisms by which evolution occurred, and these are not 100% certain. So what I'm giving here is another idea about a mechanism of evolution.

Darwin saw life as a brutal struggle for survival. This idea has been echoed by many scientists over time, including Richard Dawkins with his "selfish gene" theory. CTD has perhaps inadvertently raised the interesting point that many organisms seem to live in harmony with their environments; they are not only well-adapted, but can respond to an extent as conditions change. It is when those conditions change too drastically, too rapidly, that organisms have to evolve to meet those changes, or go extinct.

What's implied here is that organisms' survival is driven by their environment; however, that this is a dog-eat-dog struggle is one viewpoint, another being that organisms work with each other and with the earth in striving to achieve harmony and equilibrium. Most scientists see this as a fringe idea of little merit, a bit hippy-ish, a bit mystical, but the scientists who advocate it are onto something in my opinion.

I've just started reading a book by Dr. Bruce Lipton, a medical school professor. He's got some fascinating ideas about things. For example, he is currently illustrating his idea that organisms like human beings can be viewed as a symbiotic community of trillions of cells, each of which possesses a rudimentary consciousness and its own mechanisms for survival. The cells of the human body are specialised to do different things because it is efficient and beneficial for each. I've got some ideas about where he's going with this and I'm keen to keep reading. I know that he is going to explain at some point why allopathic medicine is fundamentally flawed, and I think this would appeal to just about everyone on this forum.

Here is part of what he says about Darwin and natural selection:

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Genetic evolutionists warn that if we fail to apply the lessons of our shared genetic destiny, which should be teaching us the importance of cooperation among all species, we threaten human existence. We need to move beyond Darwinian theory, which stresses the importance of individuals, to one that stresses the importance of community. British scientist Timothy Lenton provides evidence that evolution is more dependent on the interaction among species than it is on the interaction of individuals within a species. Evolution becomes a matter of the survival of the fittest groups rather than the survival of the fittest individuals. In a 1998 article in Nature, Lenton wrote that rather than focusing on individuals and their role in evolution, ". . . We must consider the totality of organisms and their material environment to fully understand which traits come to persist and dominate."

Lenton subscribes to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis that holds that the Earth and all of its species constitute one interactive, living organism. Those who endorse the hypothesis argue that tampering with the balance of that super-organism called Gaia, whether it be by destroying the rainforest, depleting the ozone layer or altering organisms through genetic engineering, can threaten its survival and consequently ours.

He also makes a case for genes being blueprints for proteins which are programmed by the environment and the cells themselves. I was saying in another thread that only 40 hox genes control the way an organism develops, and this seems to be the case for all organisms. That's pretty astounding, as my source for that information remarked. Unfortunately the people I was talking with there were so bent on pouring scorn on everything I said that they appear to have missed this. How can 40 genes control the development of organisms? Lipton says a lot about the role of genes in his book and it would be a big effort for me to reproduce it here, but I think his idea of genes being vehicles rather than the architects themselves, is interesting. This also chimes well with Sheldrake's idea of morphogenetic fields.

Most scientists would lose no time in telling me how crazy all of this is, but I think that Lipton and Sheldrake are visionaries who have been thinking "outside the box" and who have a unique perspective on the nature of life and consciousness. All of this seems to be lost when evolutionists and creationists entrench themselves, neither listens to the other, and no alternative ideas are considered. Quite a few of the most hardcore atheist-evolutionists at EvC are former creationists who have gone from one dogmatism to the other -- from believing in creationism, to thinking that science explains everything and that if it isn't detectable with the five senses or if it doesn't fit current scientific ideas, it is magic or fantasy. This is understandable if they are bitter about the years in which they were fed, and believed, the kind of pseudoscience that people like Hovind advocate, but in switching "sides" they've thrown the baby out with the bathwater so to speak. They continue to cut my own ideas to ribbons on other forums and they don't like Sheldrake or Lipton very much.

I've got Elvis to thank for introducing me to Lipton. Not the genuine article of course, but our own unique individual on this forum, who sadly hasn't been active here for a while.