Ed Elkin sent me this, and it was so delicious to me — as it could be delicious to you — and so timely, that I want to send it back out: http://www.yourchoiceforchange08.org/index.php?d=c3V6YW5uZSB0YXlsb3I=

Another subject: Thanks for the GREAT responses to my title request for my movie, which I'm still sifting through. If more of you are going to give me ideas, the time is NOW. Also, if anyone has any leads to possible funding for marketing my movie, please put me in touch.

One response had something in it that kicked me back to something I periodically trot out and try to float, which also is timely now. As ideas are being offered to the Obama administration, how about it getting behind a revival of The Twilight Club? Throughout the last century, it was an enterprise where leaders of thought came together with the intention of countering the moral decline of society by bolstering spiritual and ethical awareness. It's o­ne of the great treasures of our history, and yet virtually no o­ne has heard of it. If I had clout, it's what I would try to launch. If anyone has the power — and some of you o­n this list do — I would become your enthusiastic helper.

Here's some material that's been written about The Twilight Club:

Some of the members: Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Edwin Markham, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas J. Watson, Rudyard Kipling, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Louis Tiffany, Walter Russell.

Their conviction was that world peace, harmony and unity would o­nly come about through the brotherhood of man. They were convinced that a person's moral creed could not remain as words and platitudes, but must be translated into action. Building o­n this idea, they formed The Poets' Code of Ethics, intended as a worldwide moral code that related strictly to how people acted towards each other, the ethical nature of the code being based o­n the concept of service to others and to the world…

Andrew Carnegie strongly advocated the necessity of spreading the seeds of culture, morality and ethics. He promised to endow millions for educational purposes-particularly through building libraries. He also organized the Authors' Club, providing a house o­n 34th Street in New York, entirely free of charge providing that each member of the club agreed to write something every year that had a direct bearing o­n and reference to the moral code of ethics.
 
Out of this visionary effort came the Scout movement. As their meetings were 'rotated' from house to house, they eventually named their group the Rotary Club, now the Rotary Club International, with millions of members all over the world devoted to service. Other service clubs followed, such as the Kiwanis and the Lions.

Others inspired by the Twilight Club vision, such as Edwin Markham and Sophie Irene Loeb, worked to bring about change in social conditions, such as the elimination of sweatshops, compulsory education and child labor laws. Eugene Grace, president of the Bethlehem Steel Company, and Adolph Ochs, owner of the New York Times, worked to establish advertising censorship. Thomas J. Watson and Walter Russell campaigned for the elimination of the caveat emptor practice of business, which eventually led to the establishment of the Better Business Bureaus.

After the war years, Thomas J. Watson, head of International Business Machines, became inspired by the ideals of the ethical movement organized by Herbert Spencer, wanting the business world to practice these principles. He offered to pay all expenses necessary for the club activities. He, Walter Russell and Edwin Markham decided to stress culture as well as ethics, since culture stems from the arts, for World War o­ne had caused a drop in cultural growth and patronage of the arts. They decided to call this extension of the Twilight Club, The Society of Arts and Science. Taking leadership, Thomas J. Watson and Walter Russell-who lectured for twelve years to IBM employees o­n better business practices-worked with others, such as Francis Sisson, from the banking, business and legal world, to uplift the standards of industry, law and justice.

From: Jeffrey Glover [jsg365@hotmail.com]

Wonderful info – who knew? You did & thanks for sharing it – what a good idea…I would attend if and when!

From: Barbara Marx Hubbard [bmh@evolve.org]

The Twilight Club is a great idea!

From: Monica Roleff [monr@smartchat.net.au]

Fantastic, Suzanne, totally agree. I hope somebody gets behind it. Great stuff, that group of wise folks.

From: Joyce Kovelman [ASOUL1@aol.com]

Very open and interested in a Twilight for 21st C. club. Note the first o­ne – was for Men o­nly. Let's see what kind of response you get. It also reminds me of the Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome about 30 years ago and the group that Lazlo is in (Club of Hungary – I think). This is a way to get things a rolling and it would be interesting if we got some support or recognition from Obama's group too.

To Joyce from Suzanne

It's Club of Budapest which morphed into the World Shift Network http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action, but none of that has had comparable legs to the Twilight Club. Lazlo, however, is o­n our wave length. I'd love to schmooze with him about what to do.

From: Paul Cash [Paulrcash@aol.com]

Thanks, Suzanne, for sending this. For now I have no way to do anything other than sympathize and dream with you . . . but I very much appreciate having the info.

The debate that rages between evolutionists and supporters of intelligent design is a simplistic reduction of what doesn't come down to an either/or. As humankind unceasingly explores its origins, this mind-jamming conflict needs fleshing out into a bigger picture. Thanks to Roy Gibbon sending this around, I got exposed to Deepak Chopra's intelligent food for thought.

Deepak's piece comes from The Huffington Post, where he is a blogger. I've just gotten my feet wet there, as Huffington Post just accepted me as a blogger. I have made o­nly o­ne entry, and, being an old codger, am still fuzzy about the ramifications of that — like if you blog and nobody reads it, are you still blogging? If there is interest in what gets posted it rises to some level of visibility, soooco, if you guys would read what I wrote, which is a version of a post I made o­n my blog that I sent to you, and add your comments or flags or bells or whistles or whatever lets them know you like what you read, I would appreciate it. Here's the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzanne-taylor/a-call-for-attention_b_135730.html.

Intelligent Design Without the Bible

by Deepak Chopra

It is disturbing to see that the current debate over evolution has become us-versus-them. To say that Nature displays intelligence doesn't make you a Christian fundamentalist. Einstein said as much, and a fascinating theory called the anthropic principle has been seriously considered by Stephen Hawking, among others. The anthropic principle tries to understand how a random universe could evolve to produce DNA, and ultimately human intelligence. To say the DNA happened randomly is like saying that a hurricane could blow through a junk yard and produce a jet plane.

It's high time to rescue “intelligent design” from the politics of religion. There are too many riddles not yet answered by either biology or the Bible, and by asking them honestly, without foregone conclusions, science could take a huge leap forward.

If anyone here is interested in placing this debate o­n a higher plane than us-versus-them, I think the main issues are these:

1. How does nature take creative leaps? In the fossil record there are repeated gaps that no “missing link” can fill. The most glaring is the leap by which inorganic molecules turned into DNA. For billions of years after the Big Bang, no other molecule replicated itself. No other molecule was remotely as complicated. No other molecule has the capacity to string billions of pieces of information that remain self-sustaining despite countless transformations into all the life forms that DNA has produced.

2. If mutations are random, why does the fossil record demonstrate so many positive mutations — those that lead to new species — and so few negative o­nes? Random chance should produce useless mutations thousands of times more often than positive o­nes.

3. How does evolution know where to stop? The pressure to evolve is constant; therefore it is hard to understand why evolution isn't a constant. Yet sharks and turtles and insects have been around for hundreds of millions of years without apparent evolution except to diversify among their kind. These species stopped in place while others, notably hominids, kept evolving with tremendous speed, even though our primate ancestors didn't have to. The many species of monkeys which persist in original form tell us that human evolution, like the shark's, could have ended. Why didn't it?

4. Evolutionary biology is stuck with regard to simultaneous mutations. o­ne kind of primordial skin cell, for example, mutated into scales, fur, and feathers. These are hugely different adaptations, and each is tremendously complex. How could o­ne kind of cell take three different routes purely at random?

5. If design doesn't imply intelligence, why are we so intelligent? The human body is composed of cells that evolved from o­ne-celled blue-green algae, yet that algae is still around. Why did DNA pursue the path of greater and greater intelligence when it could have perfectly survived in o­ne-celled plants and animals, as in fact it did?

6. Why do forms replicate themselves without apparent need? The helix or spiral shape found in the shell of the chambered nautilus, the center of sunflowers, spiral galaxies, and DNA itself seems to be such a replication. It is mathematically elegant and appears to be a design that was suited for hundreds of totally unrelated functions in nature.

7. What happens when simple molecules come into contact with life? Oxygen is a simple molecule in the atmosphere, but o­nce it enters our lungs, it becomes part of the cellular machinery, and far from wandering about randomly, it precisely joins itself with other simple molecules, and together they perform cellular tasks, such as protein-building, whose precision is millions of times greater than anything else seen in nature. If the oxygen doesn't change physically — and it doesn't — what invisible change causes it to acquire intelligence the instant it contacts life?

8. How can whole systems appear all at o­nce? The leap from reptile to bird is proven by the fossil record. Yet this apparent step in evolution has many simultaneous parts. It would seem that Nature, to our embarrassment, simply struck upon a good idea, not a simple mutation. If you look at how a bird is constructed, with hollow bones, toes elongated into wing bones, feet adapted to clutching branches instead of running, etc., none of the mutations by themselves give an advantage to survival, but taken altogether, they are a brilliant creative leap. Nature takes such leaps all the time, and our attempt to reduce them to bits of a jigsaw puzzle that just happened to fall into place to form a beautifully designed picture seems faulty o­n the face of it. Why do we insist that we are allowed to have brilliant ideas while Nature isn't?

9. Darwin's iron law was that evolution is linked to survival, but it was long ago pointed out that “survival of the fittest” is a tautology. Some mutations survive, and therefore we call them fittest. Yet there is no obvious reason why the dodo, kiwi, and other flightless birds are more fit; they just survived for a while. DNA itself isn't fit at all; unlike a molecule of iron or hydrogen, DNA will blow away into dust if left outside o­n a sunny day or if attacked by pathogens, x-rays, solar radiation, and mutations like cancer. The key to survival is more than fighting to see which organism is fittest.

10. Competition itself is suspect, for we see just as many examples in Nature of cooperation. Bees cooperate, obviously, to the point that when a honey bee stings an enemy, it acts to save the whole hive. At the moment of stinging, a honeybee dies. In what way is this a survival mechanism, given that the bee doesn't survive at all? For that matter, since a mutation can o­nly survive by breeding — “survival” is basically a simplified term for passing along gene mutations from o­ne generation to the next — how did bees develop drones in the hive, that is, bees who cannot and never do have sex?

11. How did symbiotic cooperation develop? Certain flowers, for example, require exactly o­ne kind of insect to pollinate them. A flower might have a very deep calyx, or throat, for example than o­nly an insect with a tremendously long tongue can reach. Both these adaptations are very complex, and they serve no outside use. Nature was getting along very well without this symbiosis, as evident in the thousands of flowers and insects that persist without it. So how did numerous generations pass this symbiosis along if it is so specialized?

12. Finally, why are life forms beautiful? Beauty is everywhere in Nature, yet it serves no obvious purpose. o­nce a bird of paradise has evolved its incredibly gorgeous plumage, we can say that it is useful to attract mates. But doesn't it also attract predators, for we simultaneously say that camouflaged creatures like the chameleon survive by not being conspicuous. In other words, exact opposites are rationalized by the same logic. This is no logic at all. Non-beautiful creatures have survived for millions of years, so have gorgeous o­nes. The notion that this is random seems weak o­n the face of it.

I don't know who will bother to read all these points, which I have had to truncate. But if you think the answers are in safe hands among the ranks of evolutionary biologists, think again. No credible scientific theory has answered these dilemmas, and progress is being discouraged, I imagine, thanks to fundamentalist Christians. By hijacking the whole notion of intelligent design, they have tarred genuine scientific issues with the stain of religious prejudice.

In my next post I will offer a picture of how these questions might be answered.

For the next piece, Rescuing Intelligent Design — But From Whom?, which I found equally valuable, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/rescuing-intelligent-desi_b_6164.html

If you are an evolutionary junkie like me, you also might want to read some follow-up of critique and response. Scroll down o­n

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/searchG/?cx=partner-pub-3264687723376607%3Atlvacw-gkue&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=chopra+intelligent+design&sa.x=24&sa.y=9#1427
Continue reading →