Re: [asa] Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution

I agree. For all the importance of evolutionary theory that I've stressed in recent posts, it's not a theory of everything. Dobzhansky's quote is, after all, limited in range - "Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution." I am especially dubious about attempts to make natural solvent a kind of universal solvent for any other kind of claim about origins - e.g., the notion that the properties of our universe can be understood by some competition between baby universes that have sprung from the vacuum gobbling one another up.

Physics, after all, underlies biology, not the other way around. I don't mean that as simplistic reductionism & would also challenge the idea that physics comprehensively explains life or consciousness. But one battle at a time.

Shalom
George
http://home.roadrunner.com/~scitheologyglm

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Schwarzwald
  To: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2009 12:58 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution

  There's a small point I'd add to Moorad's observation here.

  As I've said before, I personally am very at home with evolution, and what's more, I always have been. But in the past few years, what I've started to find odd is the insistence that evolution is the single most important scientific claim in town. I cannot name a single other scientific topic that has so many educators collectively wringing their hands, wondering how they can get more students (or even adults out of school) to accept it. Why is there no comparable concern to promote the understanding of, say.. quantum mechanics, and how it differs from our common sense view of the world? (Indeed, if the authors of Quantum Enigma are right - and I'm not saying they are - the actual hope is that scientific laymen pay no attention to that topic.) What about geological processes, or chemistry, or any other number of topics? Why so much focus on one, and far and away only one, scientific issue? And why does that same focus suggest that understanding evolution is secondary to professed belief in it? And more than that, professed belief with as little room for speculations on guidance, purpose, intelligence and otherwise as possible?

  On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Douglas Hayworth <becomingcreation@gmail.com> wrote:

    FYI and FWIW, I commented briefly about this in one of my blog posts:

    http://becomingcreation.org/2009/03/like-it-or-not/

    Doug

    On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:44 AM, Alexanian, Moorad<alexanian@uncw.edu> wrote:
> The central issue
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> The central issue of the essay is the need to teach biological evolution</wiki/Biological_evolution> in the context of debate about creation and evolution in public education</wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_public_education> in the United States.[2] The fact that evolution occurs explains the interrelatedness of the various facts of biology, and so makes biology make sense.[3] The concept has become firmly established as a unifying idea in biology education.[4]
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> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution
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> It is interesting that it does not say "as a unifying idea in biological research."
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> Moorad
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Received on Thu Jul 30 13:11:05 2009