Re: Michael Behe's testimony Monday afternoon

Ted Davis wrote:
> Then the questioning got even more interesting. Mike referred to the five
> different "theories" that, according to the late Ernst Mayr (arguably
> the leading evolutionary biologist of his generation), actually make up
the
> larger "theory" of evolution. He took this analysis from Mayr's book,
> One Long Argument, pp. 36-7, but our library copy is presently checked out
> so I cannot give all of the details I'd like to. I can't remember one
> of Mayr's five "theories" at all and I'm not completely sure about
> some of the others, but my notes would indicate this is what they are:

Ted,

What a coincidence! Just last week I had pulled out Mayr's paper on Darwin's
Five Theories to read again. The version that I have (which was one used in
my graduate student Macroevolution class at Wash U. in 1992), is chapter 25
in the book _The Darwinian Heritage_, edited by D. Kohn, 1985, Princeton
Univ Press, Princeton. The chapter title is "Darwin's Five Theories of
Evolution", and they are:

1) Evolution as such
2) Common Descent
3) Gradualism
4) The Multiplication of Species
5) Natural Selection

I've always thought the paper was a very good. Of course, it's hard for me
to imagine any of the theories apart from the others. Obviously, the strong
(i.e., exclusive) forms of gradualism and natural selection are not held by
many today, although few would say that natural selection is not a major
factor (along with genetic drift, etc.) in determining the process of
evolution.

In other words, there are still some gaps with regard to our being able to
irrefutably demonstrate that natural selection was sufficient to account for
specific novelties that have evolved. So Behe and other IDologists
(IDologues?) still have a gap to live in. The problem is that ID doesn't do
to help fill the gap. It is, as others have said repeatedly, a
science-stopper. Is that what we want to teach youngsters - that there
aren't any exciting more scientific (natural) explanations to be found?

Doug

> Then the questioning got even more interesting. Mike referred to the five
> different "theories" that, according to the late Ernst Mayr (arguably
> the leading evolutionary biologist of his generation), actually make up
the
> larger "theory" of evolution. He took this analysis from Mayr's book,
> One Long Argument, pp. 36-7, but our library copy is presently checked out
> so I cannot give all of the details I'd like to. I can't remember one
> of Mayr's five "theories" at all and I'm not completely sure about
> some of the others, but my notes would indicate this is what they are:
Received on Wed Oct 19 23:46:26 2005