Yockey made another appearance on talk.origins a couple of months ago.
I spent a considerable amount of time trying to defend his views.
Unfortunately, Yockey did not reply himself, however he did send me
a very nice letter by e-mail thanking me for my support. Since that
time we have been exchangeing letters every couple of weeks or so and
I've gotten to know him a little. He's a very interesting person, more
controversial in his private communications than in public, believe it
or not :). I also learned a little more about his background, for example
his PhD is in Physics from Berkely and his dissertation committee included
two Nobel Laureates (one current and one future), i.e. E. O. Lawrence and
Emilio G. Segre respectively. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical
Sosiety and has a number of publications in solid state physics.
Interestingly, he was also elected Fellow of the Explorers Club of New York
for his many adventurous canoeing expeditions and has a number of
publications in _The Explorers Journal_ and _Canoe_. Perhaps this explains
his adventurous opposition to the Lumpenintelligentsia ;-).
In his most recent letter he informed me that his reply to Avshalom
Elitzur has been accepted by _Journal of Theoretical Biology_. He's
going to send me a copy by snail-mail, the abstract goes as follows:
==========================================================================
"This comment is in response to a paper previously published in the Journal
entitled "Let there be life", by A. C. Elitzur. [Elitzur Journal of
Theoretical Biology v168 pp429-459 (1994)] Elitzur ascribes to Eigen the
proposal that life began with the appearance of an autocatalytic
(self-replicating) molecule. This was discussed by biologists and
philosophers in the nineteenth century. Eigen's proposal is moot: there never
was a primeval soup. The absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Elitzur
also confuses thermodynamics with statistical mechanics. The statistical
equation of Boltzmann and Planck for entropy appears in discussions of
statistical mechanics not in discussions of classical thermodynamics. Elitzur
calls the Second Law of Thermodynamics an explanation of evolution. On the
contrary, his mentor Eigen (Eigen & Schuster, 1977) wrote: "In physics we
know of principles which cannot be reduced to any more fundamental laws. As
axioms, they are abstracted from experience, their predictions being
consistent with the consequences that can be subjected to experimental test.
Typical examples are the first and second law of thermodynamics. Darwin's
principle of natural selection does not fall into the category of first
principles." The reader is invited to compare the material in Elitzur's paper
with the discussion in Yockey (1992) Information Theory and Molecular Biology
Cambridge University Press c Academic Press Limited
===========================================================================
I asked Yockey about Glenn's question above and will summarize his answer
here (if he gives one :). I also invited him to participate here directly.
Hopefully he will, we'll see ;-).
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Brian Harper:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=
"I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,
044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 protons in the
Universe and the same number of electrons." Arthur Stanley Eddington
:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=