Structuralism in nature (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 00:57 (3974 days ago)

My favorite Michael Denton on patterns of structure underlying evoluiton:-CONCLUSION
The primary structuralist premise that life's basic forms are a
natural and lawful part of the order of the world is a perfectly
rational and naturalistic conception—every bit as rational,
surely, as the post-Darwinian denial of life's fundamental lawfulness
and naturalness, and the post-1859 reassignment of
organisms from the realm of nature to the realm of the artifact.
Future researchers may well look back in astonishment at
the post-Darwinian era in which most biologists deemed life's
forms mere artifacts of time and chance, with no less significance
in the cosmic order than a wind-blown pattern of leaves.
Although no biologist can deny that adaptation is ubiquitous
in the living world, the Darwinian claim that ALL organic order,
including the deep homologies, can be reduced to functionalist
explanations is far from compelling. After 150 years of focused
functionalist effort, the grand taxonomic system and the
ascending hierarchy of homologous patterns has still not been
adequately accounted for in functionalist/adaptive/Darwinian
terms.
The evidence presented in this review has highlighted the following
observations: the profound fitness of the laws of nature
for life as it exists on earth, revealed by advances in 20th-century
cosmology, fundamental physics, and biochemistry; the failure
to find the elusive genetic blueprints demanded of the functionalist
paradigm; the revelation that at least some of the core
molecular, cellular, and even higher organismic forms of life
are the emergent result of the self-organization of matter; and
the developmental robustness of the type, a robustness which
recent advances have re-emphasized. When these observations
are taken in conjunction with the 'primal failure' of the functionalist/
adaptationist paradigm to explain the deep homologies
and the existence of types, it is hard to refuse the possibility
that the 21st century will witness a full-scale structuralist revival.
Perhaps the metaphor of the crystal may yet eclipse the metaphor
of the watch, and the grand taxonomic system return to
its proper ontological status as an intrinsic part of the timeless
order of nature.-http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2013.3/BIO-C.2013.3