More Denton: Last essay of a 3 part series (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 15, 2015, 14:03 (3209 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Wednesday, July 15, 2015, 14:23

DAVID: Michael Denton's book Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, outlined the problems with Darwin's theory 30 years ago. This series of three essays covers the research since then and makes the point that the complexity of life and evolution in the new discoveries, makes Darwin theory even less likely to be correct than he thought before. [...] A brief sampling:
http://inference-review.com/article/evolution-a-theory-in-crisis-revisited-part-three-Yet again, thank you for a fascinating essay and for providing us with relevant extracts. I am adding a few quotes (marked EXTRA), with a view to possible discussion.
 
EXTRA: “No one has successfully proposed any kind of selection pressure that would be effective in the change from one niche to the other; whether the bridging group would be pulled by advantages in the new milieu or pushed by disadvantages in the old.”
“If not small-scale changes, then what? “[G]enetic mechanisms,” Vincent Lynch has argued, “that are distinct from those involved in the modification of existing characters.”-Darwin proposed random mutations which would provide advantages in any milieu, and his gradualism required bridging groups. On both counts, you and I are sceptical. Your proposal is God's preplanning and/or dabbling, and my alternative is an autonomous inventive mechanism (possibly designed by your God) within cell communities, which cooperate to make all the adjustments necessary for the innovation. There is no bridging group, randomness, or even selection pressure (as the goal is improvement rather than survival). Cellular intelligence does it all.
 
EXTRA: “More than a century ago, Alfred Russel Wallace noted correctly that brain size is today more or less uniform across the human species. Assuming that brain size is a marker of intellectual ability, Wallace reasoned that prehistoric man did not use his brain to its capacity. The human brain was, for prehistoric man, “an instrument beyond the needs of its possessor,” and “of a kind and degree far beyond what he ever requires to do.”-"Ancient African hunters were equipped with all the basic linguistic and cognitive potential that modern human beings share. These they never used. The great frescos of Lascaux and Les Combarelles were painted only thirty thousand years ago. Written languages are only five thousand years old. Only during the past five hundred years have human beings undertaken a scientific revolution.”-This is like saying evolution should have happened in a day! The first cell was also “an instrument beyond the needs of its possessor”, since bacteria did not need to evolve. Every innovation has therefore led to organs and organisms of a kind and degree far beyond what was “required”. And just as innovations have changed single-celled organisms into complex beings over billions of years, the human brain has changed simple thoughts - probably concerned only with survival - into complex thoughts over thousands of years. Innovations, ideas, experiences accumulate and are passed on, and languages evolve with this accumulation. Some innovations (e.g.writing) accelerate the process by making ideas more widely accessible. Just as the first cells must have contained the mechanism for evolution (i.e. some kind of “brain”), so too did the early human brain contain the mechanism for reproducing, inventing, sharing, and complexifying ideas. The mystery for me is the source of the mechanism, not the evolution of its products (which include language).-EXTRA: “In the century after Darwin, the majority of paleontologists subscribed to, or otherwise endorsed, some version of orthogenesis: the doctrine that evolutionary change is directed by internal factors having no connection with adaptive fitness…”-"Against every Darwinian expectation, there is now a “growing appreciation of the oft-dismissed possibility of evolution of new genes from scratch…” As genomic comparisons become ever more sophisticated, it is increasingly apparent that evolution from scratch may have been the route to new genes throughout the history of life.” -If we believe in common descent, every innovation must have taken place within existing organisms. “Evolution from scratch” suggests separate creation, but once again, the internal factor governing innovation could be an inventive mechanism or “brain” contained within the cell/cell community.-"One of the most curious aspects of the almost universal acknowledgement that the cosmos is fine-tuned for life is the failure to take the next logical step and infer that nature is fine-tuned, as well, for the origin and evolution of life. This failure is one of the most striking in recent scientific history, an episode made all the more extraordinary when it is also widely conceded that the origin of life remains utterly enigmatic.”-Another great paragraph. Of course it is a powerful argument for theism. The counter argument, as I see it, would be the addition of “as we know it”, applied both to the cosmos and to life. We have no idea if a different cosmos would have resulted in different forms of life or no life at all, and this brings us back to the wretched “anthropic principle”, which can be used equally to support theism and atheism. Obviously if x and y were not x and y, there would be no x and y, but does that mean there would be nothing at all? The whole problem “remains utterly enigmatic”.