More Denton: My review of my reading so far (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, March 03, 2016, 13:09 (2977 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I can only discuss what you tell me as I haven't read the book, but it seems self-evident to me that the advances would be guided by initial structures and constraints. ...“Rules of nature” is what bothers me. There has to be a mechanism within the cell/cell community that enables it to adapt/invent. This leads to two questions: 1) Where did it come from? 2) How does it work? “Rules of nature” answers neither of those questions, and is therefore just as nebulous as all the other hypotheses we come up with, like God, sheer luck, or an evolving panpsychist consciousness. But perhaps Denton will come up with some answers.-DAVID: Deeper in the book he describes many odd evolutionary circumstances that, in his opinion could not have been solved by Darwin's theory. No answers yet.-Which theory? So far, the argument only discredits the theory of random mutations and gradualism, which we have long ago dismissed and the basic problem of which, in relation to the Cambrian, even Darwin himself was aware of. Yes, he seems to have got it wrong, but this is flogging a dead horse for the thousandth time.-DAVID (under "Cambrian explosion"): Denton's point was the original body plan in all organisms had the nerve cord ventral and heart, vessels and gut dorsal and with the appearance of vertebrates everything suddenly reversed with no evidence for gradual changes, all controlled by the same genes. Not Darwinian at all. Same functional organs, different positions. A completely different body plan, seemingly by saltation. I view it as advanced pre-planning for upright posture. He made no comment, but used it as anti-Darwin evidence.-Same again, ad nauseam, and the same yet again in the post relating to types: “...there are innumerable taxon-defining novelties not led up to gradually from some antecedent form”. Darwin believed “natura non facit saltum”. We think he was wrong. He also said his theory depended on small gradual changes as opposed to big leaps. We think he was wrong again. So either we opt for biblical separate creation, or we opt for Darwinian common descent, and if we opt for common descent (and you and I think Darwin got that right), we must search for the mechanism that has enabled organisms to innovate, and of course we will wonder how it works and where it came from. Denton's ”rules of nature” won't help us.