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What a great book! I enjoyed it from cover to cover. Mr. Schroeder explored a lot of ground, but perhaps the most significant portion to me was his integration of information theory: how breaking down reality substrate by substrate, we eventually arrive at an intangible called Information. All the layers science is uncovering are giving us clues that don't seem to make practical sense at the physically observable level of existence. I had a goose bump moment on page 152 when Schroeder presented the analogy of the brain and a radio: if you smash a radio, the music you were listening to is still "out there." I've had the suspicion for a while that our brains do not produce our thoughts, but function as receivers/processors of them. In other words, our brains are set up to physically manifest ideas from another location. Where this place is and how it works I have no idea yet, but I suggest the mathematically predicted existence of other dimensions (than our currently perceived ones) could possibly produce a location. But that's my own thought, and I'm not trying to say Mr. Schroeder was implying that. Schroeder manages to bring several provocative ideas to light that are oddly connected. Certainly the doubters will continue to doubt, and the believers will continue to believe; conversion wasn't Mr. Schroeder's goal. He tactfully makes clear in several places in the book that his desire is simply to raise important questions that haven't really been answered by antiquated ideas. Antiquated ideas such as the preposterous assumption that natural selection and advantageous mutation in individual generations was the sole factor responsible for the current state of the evolution of life on this planet. No, I'm not a creationist, nor anyone else out to use questionable assertions to back my hypotheses, so put away the guns, Dawkins Dittos. It's a simple matter of basic mathematics. Read the next paragraph carefully: If you add up the mutations necessary from non-life to a single- celled organism, then the myriad mutations necessary from single cell to the astounding number of variations of biological life in this biosphere called Earth (approximately 2 million known, but 5 to 100 million estimated), you would find it impossible to achieve the complexity and variation that the earth presently parades. Even as miraculously high a frequency as one mutation per EACH successive generation would still not account for life as we now experience it. The Cambrian period alone should make us wonder what the heck is going on. Years of breeding fruit flies has given us an enormous amount of more fruit flies; a few mutated for one generation, yes. Have any natural (i.e. random chance) mutations turned into species- altering new generations? No. Though Schroeder doesn't mention it, while I'm on the subject... where are the MILLIONS of transitional fossils hiding? We now know enough about molecular biology to realize that even a single cell is way too complex to evolve as quickly as once assumed. DNA is also too intricate to explain so easily. Schroeder mentions the symposium held at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Physiology, in which mathematicians attempted to force biologists to face the fact that random mutation could not have been the sole factor in the evolution of life. The numbers just don't match up. Not to mention the inexplicable behavior of life at the cellular level. Or how about the ATP "chicken-and-the-egg" conundrum? A theory revered as empirical fact by the experts should be able to provide more tenable explanations than we're being provided. Get off those intelligentsia high-horses for a moment and give this some thought. Mr. Schroeder isn't trying to "insert God here;" he's merely saying what should be obvious to anyone with any clear sense of reality and probability: that there has to be more to the story than just chance mutation. Again, to drive this potentially uncomfortable truth home for you: According to the time frame dictated by the exhaustive fossil record, there hasn't been enough time for random mutation alone to account for the current complexity of life on this planet. Read Schroeder's book and give it some thought for yourself. It's a compelling volume. Remember: scientific paradigms are only paradigms until new ones usurp them. No previous dogma of science has ever been replaced without a venomous battle. Let's try opening our eyes for once, instead of blindly dismissing inconvenient facts. |