As Darwin Year ends, some seek to go “beyond Darwin”
As this Darwin Year 2009 draws to a close, I have to say a lot of the public debate it prompted came down to the sterile old clash between evolution and creationism. The issue of religion always hung in the air, with the loudest arguments coming from the creationist side defending it or the neo-atheists like the Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins denouncing it. In the end, the squabbling seemed to be more about ideology than science and told us little we didn’t already know.
So I was intrigued by a conference held at UNESCO here in Paris recently about scientists who believe in evolution but want to go “beyond Darwin.” Organised by French philosopher of science Jean Staune, its speakers argued that Darwin could not explain underlying order and patterns found in nature. “We have to differentiate between evolution and Darwinism,” said Jean Staune, author of the new book “Au-dela de Darwin” (Beyond Darwin). “Of course there is adaptation. But like physics and chemistry, biology is also subject to its own laws.”
Michael Denton, a geneticist with New Zealand’s University of Otago, said Darwinian “functionalists” believed life forms simply adapted to the outside world while his “structuralist” view also saw an internal logic driving this evolution down certain paths. His view, which he called “extraordinarily foreign to modern biology,” explained why many animals developed “camera eyes” like human ones and why proteins, one of the building blocks of life, fold into structures unchanged for three billion years.
The speakers here — all academics from fields such as genetics, neurobiology, psychology and paleontology — are of course neither the first nor the only scientists to argue that life must have evolved by more than just natural selection. Several mentioned the British paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, who argues that the evolutionary convergence of life forms “throws severe doubt on a number of fashionable presuppositions in evolution.” But it was interesting to see how many different arguments the scientists brought to supplement the basic evolution thesis they supported.
Denton is an interesting case because he is a scientist with publications in peer-reviewed journals who was originally close to the intelligent design movement. His 1985 book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” helped launch the “ID” movement and he was linked to the Discovery Institute, a leading advocate of the controversial idea. But he later changed his mind and argued in the 1998 book “Nature’s Destiny: How the Law of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe” argued that evolution occurred but was channeled down certain paths by inherent structures in nature.
A few days after the conference, I sat down with Staune and Denton to find out more about their ideas and what they might mean for religion. Excerpts from these interviews are on the following page.
(UPDATE: Due to technical problems, the original “page 2″ option here did not work on this post on all our websites. Following is the second page.)
from The Great Debate UK:
The debate over Darwin 150 years on
Debate continues to swirl around the theory of evolution Charles Darwin proposed 150 years ago in his groundbreaking book, "On the Origin of Species," despite its universal acceptance among scientists.
Before Darwin's discovery, the world was generally thought to have remained more or less the same since its creation. This belief, based on Biblical interpretations, was contested through fossil studies showing that species change over time.
Darwin's legendary round-the-world 1831-1836 voyage aboard the HMS Beagle generated his most significant observations and discoveries, inspiring his work on natural selection.
Although Darwin first used the term "natural selection" in a paper in 1842, it wasn't until 1859 that he published his controversial theory that all living beings share a common ancestry -- a discovery that remains vital to modern biology.
Author Nick Spencer, director of studies at Theos, a research organisation launched in 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, explained why the debate persists to this day.
"People are encountering evolution not so much as a science but as a philosophy," he told Reuters ahead of a Nov. 24 lecture at Westminster Abbey to mark the anniversary of the exact date on which Darwin's book was first published.
The ongoing debate astounds me. As a science teacher in the United States, I’ve had a wide variety of pamphlets, and readings, and emails that (as Anon mentioned in the first post) focus on minuscule examples that appear to be exceptions to the theory. What astounds me is how many of these arguments are at odds with each other. Hopefully as technology and knowledge increase, we will see new approaches to this “debate” from those opposed to evolution.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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Evolution can’t explain patterns in nature? Absolute bunk.
There is a reason why common forms of animal exist in nature. Because not all forms are equal in utility or success. Natural selection shows how certain aspects will be more successful in lifeforms, hence these aspects are likely to be more common.
So a scientist claiming that evolution doesn’t explain convergent evolution is just as odd as a scientist saying that evolution as a process is random.
This has nothing to do with going ‘beyond’ Darwin.
This is probably just another attempt to insert the concepts of design into evolutionary theory. Design implies designer. Designer implies supernatural. Supernatural implies religion.
If so, its been tried before. And people are wise to it.