More Denton: A new book (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, February 04, 2016, 15:42 (3005 days ago) @ David Turell

Michael Denton continues his sharp criticism of Darwin theory. A book review:-http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/denton-introduction/-"Enter biochemist Michael Denton, who helped touch off the ID movement over 30 years ago with his seminal Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Dr. Denton is perhaps uniquely qualified to speak to this issue. As a religious agnostic, he has no doubt that evolution occurred and that the process though which it occurred was entirely natural. Moreover, he is firmly convinced that the diversity of life can be accounted for based on “descent with modification” from a common ancestor.-"So what sets Denton apart from your run of the mill materialist Darwinian such as Richard Dawkins? Just this: From the days of Darwin himself to this present moment, the Darwinist has said that if the fossil data do not conform to the theory, so much the worse for the data. In contrast to this approach, Denton subscribes to the crazy notion that one should try to conform his theory to the observations instead of the other way around. Denton's approach has profound implications for evolutionary theory. At a fundamental level it means that a theory of evolution that synchs with the observations must account for the discontinuities that are all but ubiquitous in the fossil record, instead of always struggling to write such discontinuities off as an artifact of an imperfect record. In Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis Denton sets out to do just that.-***-"I found Denton's reference to laws of biological form very interesting in light of my recent post entitled ID for Materialists. In that post I argued that materialists should stop running from the overwhelming teleology that even the most cursory glance at the data reveals and instead join the search for “natural telic laws” that Thomas Nagel described in Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. And indeed Denton cites Nagel in his book.-***-"This means that while the functionalist asserts that organisms are infinitely malleable and arose through a fundamentally stochastic and contingent process, structuralists assert that the development of organisms is constrained by natural telic laws. The Types arose spontaneously and abruptly as a result of the innate properties of biomatter acting in accordance with natural telic law, and only relatively minor adaptations of the Types can be attributed to Darwinian processes.-"The structuralists view, of course, has the advantage of being consistent with the fossil record. That record does not show, as Darwin suggested, a finely graduated organic chain between major Types. Instead, it shows abrupt appearance of various Types followed by stasis.-***-" The fossil record is instead conspicuous for the absence of transitional forms from fish fin to pentadactyl limb. This means one of two things if a purely naturalist account of evolution is true: (1) all of the evidence for the gradual evolution from fish fin to pentadactyl limb has been swallowed up by time, and we have to take the Darwinian account on faith in the teeth of the evidence; or (2) the Darwinian (i.e., functionalist) account is false and something like the structuralist account is true.-"There is, of course, a third alternative, and that is the Types arose as a result of the conscious choices of a designer. Interestingly, though Denton is considered a leading luminary of the ID movement, he never argues for that alternative. As I suggested in my recent post, certain forms of ID are compatible with a materialist paradigm if there is such a thing as a “natural telic law.” Denton argues for this kind of ID, and as we shall see as we explore his book in future posts, he makes a powerful case."-Comment: Who made the 'natural telic law'? And note, an agnostic at Discovery Institute.