Mazur/ Farias: Natural Selection & Nat'l Security

Jeff Farias is a musician, activist and host of progressive radio's The Jeff Farias Show.

Suzan Mazur is the author of Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Her reports have appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni, Progressive Review, CounterPunch, Scoop Media, among others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. sznmzr@aol.com

11/19/2008 -- Phoenix
(edited transcript)

Jeff Farias: Joined right now by a very special guest on the phone -- Suzan Mazur is here with us. She's a journalist who's been following the evolution story for quite a while. There's a group called "the Altenberg 16". It's a group of 16 scientists from around the world who are trying to re-examine Darwin's theories on evolution. Suzan, welcome to the program.

Suzan Mazur: Thank you so much Jeff. Great to be here.

Jeff Farias: When I first heard about this, I thought this was absolutely fascinating and obviously extremely controversial. We're still debating evolution in this country, oddly enough. . . .

Darwin's theory was 150 years ago and it really hasn't been updated very much based on all the new science out there. Correct?

Suzan Mazur: Well it was updated about 70 years ago but it needs to be updated again. And that was the reason why this group of scientists met outside Vienna this summer to discuss a remix, a reformulation of the neo-Darwinian theory -- which was remixed from Darwin's original ideas. The Altenberg conference took place in Altenberg, Austria at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in July. . . .

I interviewed one of them [the Altenberg 16 scientists] in February. He told me the symposium was going to take place and I began to interview a range of scientists about the subject [the evolution debate]. When I wrote my first story about the conference I had to come up with a name for the group. I called them "the Altenberg 16".

There are many scientists looking at this. But they [the Altenberg 16] are the first I'm aware of who've actually had the chutzpah to say publicly we're going to start talking about reformulating the [Modern Synthesis or] neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.

Jeff Farias: One of the sticking points is "suvival of the fittest". Darwinism essentially means the weaker die out and natural selection always goes to the strongest.

Suzan Mazur: Right. But that was 150 years ago. And natural selection is viewed by more sophisticated scientists as political not a scientific concept. At the time [of Darwin] it kind of fit in with the expanding colonialism of Victorian England.

It's a problem now because we have used this as a model for so many different aspects of our life. In fact it's permeated the whole culture -- banking, science, literature, law.

Survival of the fittest. Look where we are -- wars everywhere. Economic collapse. Religions at one another's throats. So it's very timely that this group of scientists is looking at a new paradigm because we're really in a crisis globally on so many fronts.

Jeff Farias: Well, Suzan, there's not really a long distance between survival of the fittest to might makes right philosophically as you can see.

Suzan Mazur: It's viewed as an ideological arm of globalization. It's probably going to play out until we come up with a new economic model.

Jeff Farias: You also talk about in one of your articles how the science of evolution has become entrenched. It's so much more about politics, more so than it's about real science anymore.

Suzan Mazur: Well it's always great if a budding scientist is on the debate team in college because so much of the victory -- becoming a really successful scientist -- is being able to persuade. Including being able to persuade those who are giving grants.

Back in Darwin's day there was a small clubby group of scientists, whereas what we now have is the Internet with all kinds of slings and arrows. You have to be prepared to take some real abuse out there.

One of the problems in pushing evolutionary science forward is that there is an ignorance about the subject. There was a split between the fields of genetics and embryology back in the 1930s. Genetics took off. Then money was thrown at it by the Atomic Energy Commission concerned about birth defects because of radiation. Math was in the mix to indicate results. There wasn't a really good way to analyze a lot of what was necessary to give embryology a similar push. So embryology sort of got marginalized.

Now we're at a point where we know there are only a certain number of human genes -- 20,000, 25,000 -- and so there's been a kind of u-turn, a new focus on embryology. Understanding what else is going on besides genes.

In fact, scientists don't know the origin of the gene. They don't know what it is. Evolutionary science has been focused on life once life arrives on the scene. How did we get there? There's not been enough attention to pre-biotic evolution [and the connection to biological evolution].

One scientist in Sweden, Antonio Lima-de-Faria [emeritus professor of molecular cytogenetics, Lund University] talks about biological evolution as the last phase in evolution. Says there were three evolutions preceding it. Atomic, chemical and mineral.

It's much more complex than most biologists want to admit or perhaps know. This is a great problem. Because the information is not there in textbooks for kids. It's not there in the newspapers. Editors refuse to print it.

It's only now that a small opening is showing up like in the New York Times. They have to say something. I've been reporting on this on the Internet for months. It's being talked about. People are curious and I think the mainstream media has no choice but to report it.

In fact, Nature magazine ran my Altenberg-Woodstock theme on its cover in September (without attribution) -- picking up on my March story carried by Scoop Media.

Jeff Farias: I want to talk a little bit more about Lima-de-Faria's book -- Evolution without Selection and something called self-assembly.

Suzan Mazur: Lima-de-Faria's Evolution without Selection was written 20 years ago. . . Lund University is putting it up on the Internet as a pdf free-access book. It should be up next week.

In the book he raises a lot of interesting issues. Some scientists consider his ideas extreme. However, things he covers in Evolution without Selection are now being pursued by more mainstream scientists.

Jeff Farias: You've also talked about a Professor Newman and self-assembly.

Suzan Mazur: Yes. Self-assembly is a process that Stuart Newman, Dave Deamer and Lima-de-Faria, for instance, understand because they have a background in physics and chemistry. They know that there's something deeper going on.

Self-assembly and self-organization -- these two concepts which have to do with cells coming together and molecules coming together -- while it appears to happen in a magical way, there's actually a bonding that takes place [between surfaces with complementary shapes]. You've got to really look to physics and chemistry.

Development goes on that has nothing to do with genes as we "understand" them. . .

Jeff Farias: A lot of this stuff happens pre-genetics. The chemicals and minerals have patterns about the way they form and come together.

Suzan Mazur: One question that I put to Dave Deamer, who's a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was: Do you see the line between life and non-life as being arbitrary? And he said yes. I'm quoting him:

"There was probably an extensive mixing of genetic information at that time as Carl Woese and others have suggested. This means that there was no tree of life at that time. Instead just countless numbers of microscopic experiments occurring everywhere as the first catalysts and genes learned to work together in cellular compartments."

Then I asked him if life has a beginning or is it just part of a process inherent to the Universe. And he said it's part of a process.

This is also what Lima-de-Faria talks about. That we're wired back to the atomic level. . . .

Jeff Farias: In your article about Stuart Newman, you say he gave you a crash course in self-organization. An extinct bird limb and explained how the limb formed. I wondered if you could illustrate that a little bit for us.

Suzan Mazur: He sat me down in front of the computer in his office and showed me some of the examples of how cells kind of clump together. He said:

"I'll show you what a self-organizational process looks like. So here [looking at cells clustering] are places where it starts up randomly, some then fade away and some get stronger. With self-organization, you can have random starts at different places but then you have competition between the centers and finally you get a pattern, which is going to oscillate. The pattern is going to subside and then it's going to come back. And it will come back with the same statistics but the peaks will be in different places. That shows it is a true self-organizational process. . . ."

So, again, these things don't happen by magic. There are certain bonds. . . .

Jeff Farias: I'd like to ask you about the politics. You've been saying that you've been reporting on this for months and it's really hard to get the information out there. There's a resistance to this new information. Where do you think that's coming from and why?

Suzan Mazur: Stuart Newman, who I think you're going to speak with at some point in the next few weeks, has said [and I've found this to be true] that "people in charge of disseminating information don't understand," may not have a background in physics and chemistry and so they push aside these concepts.

But even the scientists don't want to deal with it. And many don't understand because they're brought up in the old school. . So what you see instead are fierce attacks.

There was a fascinating article ["Why Pigs Don't Have Wings"] that came out in October 2007 in the London Review of Books by Jerry Fodor, a well known philosopher. He said a paradigm shift was about to happen. That people were not buying the old Darwinian theory of evolution as the central message anymore. When that article came out, Fodor got completely attacked.

A scientist [zoologist and philosopher] by the name of Stan Salthe at Binghamton University ran an email to various other scientists who weighed in on Fodor's article. It's absolutely astonishing how worked up these scientists got about it. They have a brilliant command of language but. . . .

Jeff Farias: Is it harder for scientists who are looking at this and trying to present this to get funding? Harder to keep their jobs when they're dealing with this stuff?

Suzan Mazur: It's true. People do lose their jobs. And that's another reason why editors don't want to report on this. They're afraid that they're going to lose their jobs with this cutback in advertising in the print media.

There's a pulse at this point for a paradigm shift. But it's really taken some effort for it to happen.

Jeff Farias: Most of the evolution theories have come from anti-science.

Suzan Mazur: Here's something Jack Maze, emeritus professor of botany at the University of British Columbia said [in Stan Salthe's email chain] about the attack on Fodor's article:

"My God, I can't believe I just read this! Are we to take this to mean that Fodor must be stopped or that his views, many of which I find interesting, must be prevented from being disseminated? What I read here is an erudite version of the polemics coming from G.W. Bush and I find it offensive in the extreme.

If, on the other hand, the fear is that Fodor will give aid and comfort to the creationists then I would recommend you ignore him and attack the creationists at their weak point, they rely on bad theology. ID, as a God of the gaps argument, leads inevitably to idolatry, and violation of the First Commandment, and the God depicted by Young Earth Creationists is one that is unacceptable to thinking monotheists.

Please do not include me among your friends."

Instead of focusing on moving the science forward, there are all kinds of excuses being made.

Jeff Farias: And the scientific method. You experiment. You test. You try out theories and if your theory can be presented, then it's scientific.

Suzan Mazur: But part of the problem is "the cycle of submission", as Lima-de-Faria puts it. Where you've got a peer review process to go through. If you've got a rather unorthodox theory, but something you see as a solid idea, you may not have much success when you submit it to a journal for approval. Because scientists hang together, they want to secure funding. If they get the endorsement of their peers, then it makes it easier to get funding, etc. Rather than going out on a limb with a new idea, scientists tend to stick with the pack. And science doesn't advance as much as it could.

Because of the Internet there's more of an opening up [of the evolution discourse] and not just among scientists -- the public has jumped in. Stan Salthe has noted that anybody who can think can now have an opinion:

["The cat is out of the bag! Darwinism is everywhere, and it is the logic of its positions that are under scrutiny by anyone who is trained to think, i.e., by an intellectual. The complexity folks are already deeply involved."]

There is a revolution happening in evolutionary science. . . .

© Scoop Media