More on Spetner's views (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 27, 2015, 19:27 (3105 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Tuesday, October 27, 2015, 19:34


> QUOTE: "“Evolution in Four Dimensions” is a good book to have around. They describe experiments of microsurgery onParamecium. A piece of the cortex was cut out, rotated 180 degrees and reinserted. The offspring inherited the change. (Lamarck 101)(David's bold)
> 
> dhw: Cellular intelligence as the driving force of evolutionary change is a “non-random evolutionary hypothesis”, but of course it would only work if the restructuring was passed on to the offspring. -Which it did in the quote.-> 
> David's comment: Note that Spetner believes in God, and perhaps Coyne explains Shapiro.-> dhw:The sentence you have put in bold is very unclear. What does “it all evolved” refer to? As Shapiro has elsewhere refused to be drawn on the subject of origins, I cannot believe for one moment that he is discussing anything other than how evolution works - not how the intelligent cell came into being. His continued very public championship of cellular intelligence therefore has nothing to do with coercion by Coyne; nor does his belief in evolution (though his 21st century view is clearly very different from Darwin's concept of it), which is compatible with both theism and atheism.-The sentence is unclear to you because perhaps you have not read Coyne. He is, in my view, one of the nasty Neo-atheists, worse then Dawkins, also now a retiring professor at U. Chicago(as is Shapiro). The writer of the quote presumes that Shapiro gives a bow to Darwin ('it all evolved') while remaining in private life a believer and knows Coyne as I do.-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Coyne-Coyne calls himself a secular Jew.