More Denton: Last essay of a 3 part series (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, July 14, 2015, 20:10 (3420 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Michael Denton's book Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, outlined the problems with Darwin's theory 30 years ago. This series of three essays covers the research since then and makes the point that the complexity of life and evolution in the new discoveries, makes Darwin theory even less likely to be correct than he thought before. This essay briefly covers a variety of subjects, with quotes from many specialist; and of especial interest to me the patterns of development that appear to be set out in the beginning for evolution to follow. A brief sampling:-http://inference-review.com/article/evolution-a-theory-in-crisis-revisited-part-three-"Whether by pull or push, the evolution of the bat “required many molecular changes to dramatically alter morphology from a limb to a wing.”-"Rewiring the gene circuits required for bat flight, recent studies show, is immensely complex.-"Karen Sears has argued that “a simple change in a single developmental pathway” might lead to dramatically different morphologies in the bat.7 Other researchers have also speculated that major morphological transitions may be achieved by minor genetic changes.8-"In light of the facts, this is a view best described as primitive. Morphological change requires extensive genetic rewriting.-***-"Human language is restricted to the human species; it is, as Noam Chomsky has observed, without any homologue in any other species. In the early 1960s, in one of the landmark advances of twentieth-century science, Chomsky showed that all human languages share the same set of syntactic rules and principles—what has come to be called universal grammar.Universal grammar is innate. It is for this reason that children learn language easily.16 Because universal grammar underlies every human language, we can speak the language of a San Bushman or an Australian aborigine, and they in turn can speak English.-***-"Ancient African hunters were equipped with all the basic linguistic and cognitive potential that modern human beings share. These they never used. The great frescos of Lascaux and Les Combarelles were painted only thirty thousand years ago. Written languages are only five thousand years old. Only during the past five hundred years have human beings undertaken a scientific revolution.-"It is curious that these human powers were acquired over only a few million years. Not only was the interval short, but the miracle occurred in small populations with limited reproduction rates and long generational times. Selection may be a powerful force, but it works effectively only when given a large number of mutations. The size of DNA sequence space searched during primate evolution is a trivial fraction of that searched by bacteria in the human gut in a single day.-***-"Against every Darwinian expectation, there is now a “growing appreciation of the oft-dismissed possibility of evolution of new genes from scratch…” As genomic comparisons become ever more sophisticated, it is increasingly apparent that evolution from scratch may have been the route to new genes throughout the history of life.38 It appears that some 30 percent of all genomes are made of ORFan genes.-"A very significant proportion of all functional genes did not emerge in the course of evolution.-***
"I would suggest that some of the basic forms of life on earth are intrinsic elements of the world. The very icon of modern biology, the double helix itself, is a natural form determined in all its exquisite geometry by the laws of chemistry and physics. Its basic structure arises from the self-organizing properties of matter. No entity in biology exemplifies so beautifully Richard Owen's two types of order: the helix as the primal pattern, and the base sequence as the adaptive mask.-"Protein folds are the basic building blocks of all proteins. The rules that generate the one thousand or so possible protein folds have now been largely elucidated; and remarkably they amount to laws of precisely the kind sought by early nineteenth-century biologists. These rules arise from higher-order packing constraints of alpha helices and beta sheets. .... Moreover, as Daniel Weinreich has shown, even the adaptations built upon the folds are greatly constrained by the biophysical properties and structures of the folds themselves.-***-"One of the most curious aspects of the almost universal acknowledgement that the cosmos is fine-tuned for life is the failure to take the next logical step and infer that nature is fine-tuned, as well, for the origin and evolution of life. This failure is one of the most striking in recent scientific history, an episode made all the more extraordinary when it is also widely conceded that the origin of life remains utterly enigmatic.-"If typology is correct, profound questions nonetheless remain. Of this, there is no doubt. If life is a natural phenomenon, how might its forms have been actualized? How can one type lead to another? Since there is, by definition, nothing between types, how did jumps occur? It is by no means clear that comparable questions have been answered in the case of inorganic chemistry."