More Denton: A new book (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, February 05, 2016, 19:07 (3214 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Michael Denton continues his sharp criticism of Darwin theory. A book review:-http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/denton-introduction/-QUOTE: "Enter biochemist Michael Denton, who helped touch off the ID movement over 30 years ago with his seminal Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Dr. Denton is perhaps uniquely qualified to speak to this issue. As a religious agnostic, he has no doubt that evolution occurred and that the process though which it occurred was entirely natural. Moreover, he is firmly convinced that the diversity of life can be accounted for based on “descent with modification” from a common ancestor."-QUOTE: "There is, of course, a third alternative, and that is the Types arose as a result of the conscious choices of a designer. Interestingly, though Denton is considered a leading luminary of the ID movement, he never argues for that alternative. As I suggested in my recent post, certain forms of ID are compatible with a materialist paradigm if there is such a thing as a “natural telic law.” Denton argues for this kind of ID, and as we shall see as we explore his book in future posts, he makes a powerful case."-David's comment: Who made the 'natural telic law'? And note, an agnostic at Discovery Institute.-I do note it, and am astonished that theists should claim an agnostic for one of them. As you very well know, it is perfectly possible for an agnostic to reject randomness without embracing theism. However, talk of a “natural telic law” may gloss over the fact that if common descent is true, innovations can only take place within individual organisms. This means that whatever mechanism caused innovations HAS to be within the organisms themselves. If you believe in God AND evolution, either he interferes with individual organisms, or he has preprogrammed them, or he has given them a mechanism with which to organize their own innovations (and lifestyles and wonders). If you do not believe in God, either you have to opt for random mutations, or again the mechanism within the organisms does its own organizing. Self-organizing organisms thus fit in with both theistic and atheistic evolution, and also happen to fit in with the findings of many researchers in the field, who tell us that cells/cell communities are intelligent, cooperate with one another, and take decisions in accordance with the demands of the environment. This theory requires substituting “opportunities offered by” for “the demands of”. The “telic law” is organisms' drive for survival and/or improvement.-You have also offered us the following comments on the subject of evolution:-Re Spetner:-http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/02/information_and102571.html-QUOTE: "In the last fifty years it has become recognized that if evolution occurs in the sense of common decent, information has to be built up. For a primitive cell to evolve into an elephant, for example, the evolutionary process has to increase the information from that in the cell until an elephant's worth of information has been achieved. There is no theory that can account for such a thing."-Yes there is. The theory that over thousands of millions of years, intelligent cells/cell communities have combined, shared information extrapolated from their environment, and cooperated in forming new combinations to exploit that environment.-Genome complexity
David's comment: As a physician I went from simply accepting evolution created this to realizing that evolution cannot create this as an unguided chance process!-If our evolutionary starting point is the intelligent cell, there is no chance involved in the process, since every innovation is the product of deliberate exploitation of the environment, though changes to the environment may themselves be the products of chance. The origin of the intelligent cell is open to conjecture.
 
Information: a computer scientist's take:
David's comment: Matt might consider this. How does biologic evolution learn and add information? Epigenetics?-According to my hypothesis, evolution does not learn or add anything. Individual cells/cell communities (organisms) learn and add and combine information before taking communal decisions, and that is how they innovate and diversify, thereby causing evolution.