[asa] Missing post to Steve Matheson

Owing to my clumsiness, the part of Timaeus' reply to Steve Matheson was not included in my earlier post. Here it now is.

Ted

***

B. To Steve Matheson:

Steve Matheson has undertaken to give his interpretation of Michael Denton. That is fine with me. However, he also makes some comments to the effect that I have misinterpreted Denton. This is not the case. Rather, Mr. Matheson has failed to take into account the difference between my terminology and his own.

First of all, Mr. Matheson is correct to say: “Nature's Destiny seeks to defend a law-based, teleological view of cosmic history in which the development of humanity is the ultimate goal. The view is non-Darwinian for sure, in the sense that such strong teleological
conceptions are non-Darwinian by definition.” Exactly right. This is my interpretation of Denton, and expresses the main difference that I have been trying to point out between front-loading design models, such as Denton’s, and true Darwinian explanations.

However, Mr. Matheson is wrong to go on, as he does: “But any claim that Nature's
Destiny does damage to modern evolutionary biology is a significant distortion.” He implies that I have made such a claim. He will not find it in any of my postings in this discussion. I have distinguished consistently between “evolution” as a process and “Darwinism” as a theoretical explanation for the process, and between “evolutionary theory” generically, and various versions of evolutionary theory (Lamarckian, Bergsonian, and so on). I have also made it clear that Denton accepts evolution as a process, but criticizes the Darwinian explanation for evolution as nowhere near sufficient. Denton does not attack “modern evolutionary biology” as such, but “Darwinian evolutionary biology”. Or, put another way, his criticism of “modern evolutionary biology” is not that it is evolutionary, or that it is modern, but that it is Darwinian. In fact, he refers favourably to another “modern” evolutionary theory, i.e., that of Stuart Kauffman.

If I was not 100% clear about where Denton “rips the Darwinian mechanism to shreds”, I will be clearer now. The bulk of his negative critique, his attack on Darwinism, is found in his earlier book, *Evolution: A Theory in Crisis* (which would have been better titled, *Darwinism: A Theory in Crisis*, since it is Darwinism, not evolution as such, that it rejects). The second book, *Nature’s Destiny*, concentrates more on expounding Denton’s positive alternative to Darwinism. Mr. Matheson is right about that. Still, the earlier critique of Darwinism is implicit in the newer book, and even augmented in the newer book, especially in the second part, where he makes pointed comments here and there directly aimed at Darwinian mechanisms, as, for example, in the first two paragraphs under “The Question of the Spontaneity of Mutation” on page 285. Thus, despite Denton’s important change in perspective between the two books, there is continuity between them, in their!
  unified critique of Darwinian explanations as woefully inadequate to explain the phenomena.

As for Denton’s alleged Platonist bias, from reading his books and articles I have the impression that his Platonism is something that has come about as the result of his biological studies, not a metaphysical framework that he began with, and forced his studies to fit, as Mr. Matheson seems to intimate at one point. In this respect I think he compares favourably with most of the celebrated promoters of neo-Darwinism (including many of Darwin’s early British and German disciples, plus Sagan, Asimov, Dawkins, Coyne, Gaylord Simpson, etc.), who began with metaphysical materialism as their philosophical template, and forced biology, including evolutionary theory, to fit to that template.

I thank Mr. Matheson for the reference to Conway Morris. He is another author I have been meaning to have a look at.

As for Mr. Matheson’s critique of Denton, I won’t enter into the fray. I’ve already indicated that I am not claiming any certainty that Denton is correct overall, and still less do I claim that he has made no scientific errors. I even agree that Denton’s assertions of fitness are often “stretched”. What I find important in Denton, from the point of view of the ID/TE debate, is that it embraces aspects of both positions, by incorporating both evolution and design, and does it in a way that is compatible with the notion of the absolute sovereignty of God, as given in the Bible and Christian tradition. Whether Denton himself believes in the Biblical God, or any kind of God, I do not know, but his overall scheme is God-friendly, much more so than Darwin’s, which can only be accommodated to Christian theism by means of ad hoc patchwork and strained arguments.

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Received on Mon Nov 17 10:31:53 2008