Criticism of Current Darwin Theory by a Darwin Believer (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, October 30, 2009, 19:19 (5295 days ago) @ David Turell

David has drawn our attention to Stuart A. Newman's pretty radical indictment of neo-Darwinism, written by a man who is obviously himself an evolutionist and I suspect also an atheist.-Early on in this article he says that incremental changes can be attributed to natural selection, but "when it comes to the innovation of entirely new structures [...] Darwin's mechanism comes up short. [...] Contrary to the expectations of the Darwinian model, the fossil record is deficient in transitional forms between organisms distinguished from one another by the presence or absence of major innovations."-Innovation is indeed one of the problems David has consistently raised, and so have I in my own non-scientific musings. The glimmer of light appears to lie in the fact that living tissues are self-organizing physical materials which "exhibit condition-dependent variability, a phenomenon also known as "phenotypic plasticity"." I love the way language endows these astonishing abilities with a scientific matter-of-factness, as if this adaptability was inevitable the moment the universe went bang. However, that is merely by the way.-Newman goes on to say: "The presence and operation of highly complex, nanoscale molecular "machines" within the cell present additional challenges to neo-Darwinian incrementalists that are not obviously soluble by either classic chemistry or the physics of macroscale chemically active materials discussed above." He says that since Crick, "increased knowledge of the complexity of the nanomolecular systems within the cell has only made the question of origination and innovation at this level more puzzling."-This complexity is assumed to have come about through the self-organization of unconscious globules of matter, but evidently it presents problems science can't solve at the moment and apparently prefers to ignore (see below). This is powerful and specialized criticism. But then for some reason, Newman continues: "Rather than Intelligent Design's credulous positing of a nanoengineer God [...] what is called for are new scientific principles of self-organization on the nanoscale." Why on earth does he bring in ID? Of course science must search for explanations, but even if the new principles of self-organization are discovered, they will not preclude the possibility of design ... which some would say becomes increasingly likely with the increasing scale of complexity ... so why make the remark in the first place? I'm not arguing for a designer. I'm arguing against predetermined conclusions gratuitously pronounced in the name of science. (And I would do the same if the writer were a Creationist.) Until the puzzling questions of origination and innovation are answered, let's have some scientific objectivity. -Finally, however - and now I'm back on his side again - Newman criticizes modern neo-Darwinists for their "hand-waving consignment of all problematic aspects of the origination of complex subcellular entities to the putative universal mechanism of random variation and natural selection," and concludes by calling for scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, without which "the education of generations to come is at risk of being sacrificed for a dying theory." I'm not so sure that the theory is dying, but if certain aspects of it are under such fire, perhaps scientists should be even more wary of claiming that "natural selection not only explains the whole of life [sic]; it also raises our consciousness to the power of science to explain how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance" (Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 116). Does it indeed?