Still following a previous post of July 11, in which i mentioned the name of Bernard d´Espagnat, the 2009 recipient of the 1 million pound Templeton prize which is now concerned with harnessing “the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it” (in its inception this prize was less about the power of science but much more about contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension) its somehow ironic that at the beginning of August, another recipient of the Templeton Prize, M.Gleiser, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College state that Humans are merely a product of randomness (which is the same as saying, as Hawking did, that God is an inveterate gambler).
More interesting however is a recent study published in Nature by Monroe et al. that challenges the prevailing paradigm of the evolutionary theory according to which “mutations occur randomly”. And building on it a researcher at the University of Portsmouth just formulated a governing law of genetic mutations that he claims also challenges the Darwinian paradigm. It seems that Monroe could be on the right track to becoming a future recipient of the Templeton prize!
PS – Yesterday, in a non-peer-reviewed paper Monroe et al. dismissed recent claims about the lack of robustness of its non-random mutations findings https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.21.504682v1.full.pdf
Pacheco-Torgal 