Review: Darwin\'s Doubt (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 20, 2013, 22:35 (4082 days ago) @ dhw


> http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/18/darwinism-and-materialism-they/
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> dhw: This article quite rightly ... in my view ... dismisses random mutations as mathematically implausible, and clearly champions ID, but ID itself (aside from Creationism, which "can be dismissed in our secular age") has no explanation for The Cambrian Explosion other than the nebulous formula "God designed it".-What is wrong with that?
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> dhw: QUOTE: "Meyer applies this to the question of the origin of the information necessary to produce new forms of animal life. He argues that the only known cause of the origin of the kind of digital information that arises in the Cambrian explosion is intelligent activity.- 
> dhw: HOW? This, David, is what lies at the heart of our own long discussion on the concept of the intelligent cell. If not through preprogramming or direct creation, then it can only be through the independent workings of the cell.-And Meyer and I don't believe coordiated workings of cells can do it independently. It has to be preprogrammed.
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> dhw: QUOTE: The protagonists of punctuated equilibrium came up with a mechanism that cannot plausibly produce so much anatomical change so quickly.
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> dhw: There is only one mechanism outside a directly intervening God that COULD produce it: namely, what the article calls "a high-tech nano-factory complicated beyond comprehension" ... which we all know as the cell. So when we talk of ID explaining the Cambrian Explosion, we have four options: 1) God himself designing every new organ, 2) God designing the intelligent mechanism that designed every new organ, 3) the intelligent mechanism creating itself by chance, 4) the intelligent mechanism evolving through some kind of panpsychist process. -I'm sticking with number 2, as I have stated before. Possibly with a dabble here and there. -At any rate the Cambrian is the dagger at the heart of Darwinism. There are no valid precursors. We have de novo advanced organisms. One can no longer blame the lack of fossils. They have been found and the earlier ones are lacking of much advancement.