RE: Developing story: Steve Gould's friend says Gould wouldnever have signed NCSE's "Steve" list

Well, basically, it's Gould's friend that's making the noise.

He says Gould never gave natural selection even so much credit that it would
be "major."

Right? Wrong?

I'm just waiting to see if structuralism turns out to be the dark horse in
the ID debate.

Cheers, Denyse

Local natural selection is an experimental fact. Witness dog breeding. What
is in question is global natural selection. I am often bewildered of the
intellectual capacity of humans and its possible emergence from random
mutation and natural selection. Surely, that rational power goes beyond what
is needed for survival and is the source of highly complex ability to do
rational thinking of the highest form, viz., mathematical abstractions and
the talent to describe nature by mathematical constructs.

Moorad

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Ted Davis
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 2:15 PM
To: amblema@bama.ua.edu; oleary@sympatico.ca
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: Developing story: Steve Gould's friend says Gould wouldnever
have signed NCSE's "Steve" list

The "Steve" list claims that "natural selection is a major mechanism in its
[evolution's] occurrence."

Behe's testimony last week went after natural selection, and natural
selection alone, among the five "theories" of evolution as Ernst Mayr
presents them. I found this part of his testimony unclear and somewhat
confusing. On the one hand, he did clearly question the idea that NS is
adequate the explain the whole shebbang, and I would agree with Behe that NS
by itself might not be able to do it. In support of this, he brought in
(for example) Kauffmann's work on self-organizing complexity, as a non-ID
challenge to NS. On the other hand, he also seemed to imply that ID is
questioning whether NS really does much of anything. This confuses me.
When I mention "microevolution" to my ID friends, they tell me that they
have no problem with this, and yet microevolution (or adaptation if you
prefer) is run by NS, at least in my understanding. If so, then it
*has* to
be "a major mechanism" in evolution. Saying that NS is a major mechanism is
not at all the same thing as saying that it is the one and only mechanism,
or even the one single major one. The choice of the indefinite article here
does seem deliberate, and appropriate. Am I missing something?

Ted

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