Whoa! Whoa! dhw take notice!!! (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 06, 2011, 19:55 (4524 days ago) @ xeno6696

I wasn’t going to get involved, but Matt has summoned me with three exclamation marks to take notice, and since we seem to be teetering on the brink of another squabble over NS, and since the spur is yet another load of old cobblers about Darwinism and Natural Selection, I will join in.

DAVID: Excellent review with many editorial overtones on "What Darwin Got Wrong":

http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=1111-scambray

REVIEW (first line): Modernism is built on Charles Darwin’s idea that the world made itself.

Excellent review? Darwin was an agnostic. His theory of evolution tells us NOTHING about how the world was made or even about how life began. Great start!

REVIEW: Beyond such adaptations or adjustments, natural selection is incapable of any innovative, irreversible changes in an organism.

Ah, that’s good. Matt, take notice!!!

REVIEW: So natural selection, the force that supposedly made the cosmos, the dynamic that philosopher Daniel Dennett audaciously calls “the single, best idea anyone has ever had” — this force which Darwinian materialists insist we must believe is our true creator upon pain of being ridiculed and marginalized —can be considered defunct.

Ugh! Take notice, Matt, of what nonsense arises out of equating NS with the whole of evolution. I don’t know of anyone who has ever claimed that NS “made the cosmos”, but David and I – and no doubt thousands of other evolutionists, including Darwin – have pointed out over and over again that NS is the filter which decides which adaptations and innovations will survive. I agree that Darwin was wrong to call his book the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, but his text attributes innovations to mutations, not to NS, and as a filter it’s no more defunct than the theory of common descent, which is so fundamental to his argument.

REVIEW: Nonetheless, having dispensed with a literal reading of Darwin, our progressive authors, Fedor and Piattelli-Palmarini, lay claim to a “diversity” of alternative explanations as the forces that drive evolution. Indeed, our co-authors come up with a series of endogenous (inside the organism) forces, having to do with accidental and tandem genetic factors, which they offer as our creators. They then proceed to explain such forces as gene regulatory net¬works, entrenchment, master genes, morphogenetic explosions, plas¬ticity, epi¬genetics, jumping genes, and so on.

And what’s wrong with that? The reviewers castigate the authors for being atheists (fair enough – atheists would castigate the reviewers for being theists), but this scientific research has nothing to do with theism or atheism. If God exists, it is perfectly feasible that he devised a mechanism which would produce a vast variety of species. That enormously complex mechanism is what science is trying to unravel. Do the reviewers think their God merely waved his magic wand? The innovations HAVE taken place, and new species HAVE come into existence. The mechanisms will be the same whether Nature made them or God made them.

MATT: There is one and only one definitive test that would permanently displace Natural Selection: A species that emerges without a corresponding stimulus from environment.

DAVID: Whoa!! We have no idea HOW NEW SPECIES EMERGE!

Spot on, but we do know that NS did not create the new organs or enable the old ones to adapt. Nothing will “displace” NS. Even a random genetic mutation without environmental stimulation will survive or not survive according to whether it is useful or not, but the mutation must take place before NS can come into play.

MATT: I’ve said before that the “filter” is the most important part of the process.

Actually, before you saw the error of your ways (nasty dig, but you’ve earned it!) you said that the filter WAS the process. And if you’ve made this statement before, may I plead with you not to make it again. How can the filter be THE most important part? What would be the point of a filter if there was nothing to be filtered? Every phase in the process is indispensable. In other words, evolution could not happen without life, reproduction, adaptation, innovation and NS. Time to move on?