Genome complexity; epigenetics: Lamarck is back (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 13:22 (3099 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This essay makes some interesting remarks about Lamarck and epigenetics, and the problems Darwin adherents and atheists are having:-http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/descartes-to-dawkins-history-...-Thank you for this revealing contribution to our debate. The quotes below make it very clear that so-called Darwin adherents have deliberately twisted Darwin's beliefs to fit in with their own. Shame on them. -QUOTES: "You might have heard of Lamarck as a crackpot: the man who said that giraffes' long necks are due to reaching high-up fruit. You may also have heard that Darwin got rid of Lamarck's idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. But in fact that's not true at all. Darwin was very much influenced by Lamarck.
"In particular, Charles Darwin believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or what he generally called the effects of use and disuse—for example, that moles eventually evolved to be blind on account of not using their eyes.
"In that sense, Darwin was very much a Lamarckian. So why did we all learn in high school biology class that Lamarck was crazy and Darwin got rid of all his crazy ideas?
"Lamarck's description of evolution as resulting from living organisms' own agency threatened God's monopoly on creation.”-Please note “own agency” - the active role organisms may play in their own evolution. The next quote provides a problem for your own theory:
 
QUOTE: "Even outside of evolutionary biology, some of the most influential thinkers and writers in biology and cognitive science today have adopted the Weismannian view that living organisms are essentially passive, made of dumb and inert mechanical parts.”-This is also your own theistic view when you revert to your theory of divine preprogramming. According to that, all the “parts” can do is passively obey the instructions laid down for them by your God 3.8 billion years ago, or let themselves be dabbled with.-QUOTE: "The engineering or design model of living nature, which they have all adopted, implies a designer. If you truly want to eliminate the designer, you need to naturalise his agency: allow the possibility that living nature has the agency to create and transform itself." (David's bold) 
David's comment: Note my bold. This is the crux of my discussion with dhw. We still don't know exactly how the epigenetic adaptations we see can lead to new species, if at all.-Your bold is certainly true: if you want to eliminate the designer, you have to eliminate the designer. But allowing the possibility that organisms have the “agency” to transform themselves does not by any means eliminate the designer, since this still leaves wide open the question of how life began, and how organisms came to possess the “agency” to transform themselves. Your bold is not the crux of our discussion, because my hypothesis that evolution develops through the “agency” of the organisms themselves is NOT a means of eliminating the designer. It explains the higgledy-piggledy bush, and is an alternative to your hypothesis that your God preprogrammed or dabbled every innovation (and natural wonder) in the course of life's history for the purpose of “balancing nature” in order to produce and feed humans.