Theistic evolution vs. Darwinism (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, February 28, 2014, 14:40 (3922 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A major issue is where do body plans come from and then last 500 million years. Is this evidence of guided evolution?:-http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26essay.html-I find all this very confusing. First, I don't know why David has put it under the heading "Theistic evolution vs. Darwinism", which is a highly misleading heading in the first place. As we have repeated over and over again on this website, and Darwin himself also emphasized, Darwinism does not exclude theism. -Secondly, if a body plan is successful within a given environment, why would it NOT last? As we keep saying, the key to "how biodiversity grows" (i.e. evolutionary development) has to be innovation, but you seem to want to have it all ways: stasis suggests guided evolution, innovation suggests guided evolution. Even higgledy-piggledy would suggest guided evolution if only you could find a way to explain it!
 
However, thirdly, the conclusion to this article seems to me to be just as confusing: -QUOTE: Does all this add up to a new modern synthesis? There is certainly no consensus among evolutionary biologists, but development, ecology, genetics and paleontology all provide new perspectives on how evolution operates, and how we should study it. None of these concerns provide a scintilla of hope for creationists, as scientific investigations are already providing new insights into these issues. The foundations for a paradigm shift may be in place, but it may be some time before we see whether a truly novel perspective develops or these tensions are accommodated within an expanded modern synthesis. -I'm not sure whether the author knows how to distinguish between creationism and theistic evolution (it pays some folk to pretend there's no difference), but since there is no consensus, and since "new perspectives" may not become a "novel perspective" (what's the difference?), and since nobody has a clue yet how life or the mechanisms that drive evolution originated or actually function, I really don't know what this article is trying to prove. There is always a scintilla of hope for alternative theories if existing theories remain so flawed.