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

No!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Davis" <tdavis@messiah.edu>
To: <amblema@bama.ua.edu>; <oleary@sympatico.ca>
Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 7:14 PM
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
>
>
Received on Tue Oct 25 15:29:10 2005