A lot of this was painful. I'll comment on bwo.life, since it is somewhat close to some of the things I know a little bit more about.
> Despite all this life and death, I doubt whether anyone would be tempted to describe the embryo’s cells as “red in tooth and claw”. Nor do I think anyone would appeal to “survival of the fittest” or natural selection as the fundamental principle governing what goes on during normal development. The life and death of cells appears to be governed, rather, by the developing form of the whole in which they participate.
This is precisely the sort of BS you get when you do not participate actively in a field, but instead go off on the side to live in your own world. During development, suvival of the fittest is very much at play; we have evidence for this, for example in the developmental trajectories of stem cell niches. Cells outcompete each other, and make it difficult for other varieties of cells to "live" along side them (this does not necessarily result in apoptosis, it can also cause re-differentiation in the less "successful" cells). A crucial reason for this is error correction: sometimes, new cells are defective in various dangerous ways (e.g. cancerous, or have problematic genetic information), and "survival of the fittest" helps to error-correct for this, as usually such defective cells are "less fit".
What's surprising here is that cells can change their fitness, "on purpose", in ways that do not make evolutionary sense. They might be programmed to reduce their fitness, or entirely explode, if they receive certain inputs. So, clearly this is an emergent process where we must take into account cellular programming along side "naive" natural selection.
"Old hat" to biologists, really, in that they have been studying this. They're studying it until today. New things are discovered all the time. There is no sense of certainty, only that there are some general outlines emerging.
Coming back then to this article: saddening, if not disgusting in its pretentiousness. Link [4]is even more depressing. I don't know if people understand how dangerous quackery is: it destroys lives. Most importantly, it destroys the lives of children whose parents fall into this.
The broader internet (being difficult to explore given how modern internet ecologies box us in) is thankfully not made up primarily of this kind of..."garbage", but it is often painted as being that way.
So, for anyone who came across this: please don't think the un-popular internet is a cesspool of "people speaking their minds, in a convenient vacuum". Rather, there are websites where people who are humble about their understanding, even if it is substantial compared to the average person's. For example: John Baez's homepage (https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/) is far richer than link [4], and actually gives you useful knowledge.
+Fravia's lore on internet searching (and reverse engineering in general) are masterpieces; showcases of what the internet can produce, while also working as effective vaccination against disinformation: http://biostatisticien.eu/www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm
His strategies for how to search for useful information on the internet remain relevant today.