Re: [asa] The term Darwinism

Doug:

I know you don't have time to reply, but I must make three more points,
which you or others might find interesting as a continuation of the
conversation:

1. By "gradualism" I wasn't referring to the speed or tempo of evolution
(though Darwin also thought that the tempo would be slow), but to its
stepwise character. That is, the important thing for Darwin wasn't so much
that it would take ten million years rather than one million years for an
okapi to evolve into giraffe; the important thing was that the changes --
however frequent as measured by clock time -- would be in small increments
(the neck would get a tiny bit longer, then a tiny bit longer, etc.) He
seemed to have in mind that something would happen to the germ material -- a
change that we would now call a mutation -- and that this something would
have an immediate effect on the phenotype, which could then be selected for
or against.

By contrast, in a non-gradualist view, the crucial thing is not just that
the tempo of evolutionary change is faster, but that larger phenotypical
changes are abrupt -- a few related characteristics may change all at once.
You could get a "hopeful monster". But on Darwin's understanding, a
"hopeful monster" would be so unlikely that it would be the equivalent of a
miracle (Darwin even says this somewhere), and therefore must be rejected by
science. It is interesting that in Denton's second book, though he doesn't
use the phrase "hopeful monster", and though he doesn't go so far as to say
that a shrew could give birth to a bat, he does suggest that numerous
genetic changes are frequently "saved up", i.e., not expressed in the
phenotype at all, and then some sort of unknown biochemical timing device
causes them to be expressed all at once. This overcomes the intellectually
incoherent part of Darwinism -- what good would an eye be with 1/2 of an
iris, 1/4 of a retina, most of the muscles missing, etc. In Denton's view,
the evolution of the eye wouldn't occur in that way. Of course Denton
doesn't mean that a fully functioning human eye would appear attached to a
worm, but he does mean that a whole set of changes in the visual apparatus
could make their phenotypical appearance long after they had made their
individual appearances in the genotype. And if this could happen, then the
"irreducible complexity" hurdle is overcome; complex organs wouldn't have to
stagger into existence as broken, imperfectly-working versions of healthy
organs, and survive to reproduce in that inferior form only by luck.
Denton's view thus deals much more seriously than any Darwinian view with
the need for co-ordination of genetic changes.

So the question is: can Denton and his followers come up with the money?
Can they show that there is some saving-and-timing mechanism operating at
the biochemical level which could allow sets of co-ordinated changes to
appear at the same time? If they can, then the Darwinian hypothesis, which
was always at best clunky, mechanical, 19th-century, and improbable, will be
rendered obsolete.

2. The reason I suggested a 500-page book is that 500 pages is the minimum
that would be needed to document the changes for any major organ or system.
Every step of the way -- and there would be hundreds of steps -- would need
diagrams of the genome with explanations of the substitutions or deletions,
diagrams of the proposed physiological changes corresponding to the genomic
changes, a discussion of the environmental aspects (selection pressures
acting on each change, etc.), and so on. I do not find it surprising that
such detailed works have not appeared, as I believe that Darwinian
explanation is mostly speculation, ad hoc non-mathematical reasoning, and
bluff. But I am surprised that most working scientists, who are normally
quite hard-headed in their fields, give Darwinian explanations a free pass
when they fail to come up with this level of detail. This shows what those
of us suspicious of Darwinism have long suspected -- that Darwinism is
believed in for more than scientific reasons. It fulfills some sort of
emotional or aesthetic need for modern man, and is not easily given up, even
when 150 years later it still can't take us from point A to point B in
detail, as virtually all other sciences can.

3. Yes, many people here would affirm the existence of design in some vague
manner. But for many of those people design has no *explanatory* value.
That is, the evolutionary process can be explained *just as completely*
whether a designer orchestrated it or whether it occurred due to a
fortuitous collision of blind atoms that just happened by cosmic freak to
have the properties that they did. Belief in design is a private option,
like choosing whether or not to have your Dairy Queen cone "dipped" or
"plain". Whereas from the ID perspective, just as the architect's design
for a building is *essential* to the explanation how the building came into
being, so design is essential to explaining why the structures of life are
the way they are. Without design, the existence of a building is
*unintelligible*; similarly, ID argues, without design, the existence of the
tightly integrated structures of life is *unintelligible*. And science
should above all be seeking *intelligibility*. Certainly both Classical
(Graeco-Roman) and Mediaeval science sought intelligibility and believed it
was achievable. But evolutionary biology appears to be willing to surrender
intelligibility in order to preserve a certain methodology. It makes the
form of investigation more important than the substance of the thing to be
investigated. It refuses to accept design as a genuine explanatory factor,
not because it has a better explanation for the appearance of design -- it
doesn't -- but because admitting design would involve admitting the
inadequacy of its current forms of investigation. And here all kinds of
non-scientific factors -- philosophical justifications of particular
theories of knowledge, the colossal size of professional egos, etc. -- are
involved.

Cameron.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Hayworth" <becomingcreation@gmail.com>
To: "Cameron Wybrow" <wybrowc@sympatico.ca>
Cc: "asa" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 2:46 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] The term Darwinism

Hi Cameron,

This will have to be my last comment on this thread. Thanks for the
discussion...

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 12:55 PM, Cameron Wybrow<wybrowc@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Hi, Doug!
>
> Re Point 1, I had in the back of my mind two things:
>SNIP
> So we're not disagreeing on Point 1.
>
> RE Point 2, I think that majority of the scientific community did support
> Darwin's form of gradualism until fairly recently.

It depends on what on considers "Darwin's form of gradualism". I think
that since the modern synthesis, and definitely since elucidation of
DNA as the means of particulate inheritance, nearly everyone
acknowledged the various levels and types of characters (e.g.,
genetic, biochemical, morphological, etc.) could exhibit different
pictures of the tempo of evolution. Few, I think, remained strict
Darwinian gradualists.

>
> On Point 3: Just as an aside, you use the word "demonstrate" far more
> loosely than I
> would. But if you really believe that macroevolutionary mechanisms have
> been "well-documented", there is an easy way of proving me wrong: provide
> me with the titles of those 500-page books I mentioned earlier. I

As I said, we'll just have to agree to disagree. I didn't expect for
you to accept my line of reasoning. I don't know if there are any
500-page books that outline the "proof" for macroevolution. (500-page
books are a 19th century way of making an argument). The evidence is
in the thousands if individual phylogeographic, character-evolution
and other kinds of evolutionary research studies that have been done.
I described one type of such a study, and you could find many such
original research articles in the pages of evolutionary biology
journals.

> On Point 5, The boundary between science and
> metaphysics is much blurrier than many people here suppose. But it's a
> useful polemical device when people, for either atheist or Christian
> reasons, wish to prevent others from discussing the possibility of
> intelligent design.

But none of us on this list need convincing about the possibility of
intelligent design. We all believe in a creator who designed the
creation. We just disagree about whether the idea of intelligent
design helps explain anything scientifically (except for the basic
anthropic principle that provides us with a reason to believe that the
structure of the universe is rational enough to enable us to do
science).

Doug

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Received on Fri Jul 3 16:07:00 2009