Thursday, January 5, 2012

No Room Left for Theories of Evolution

What Darwin Got Wrong, I enjoyed this book. I did not find it too hard to read, or written in to technical a manner, even though both author’s are very well educated with a good basis in the science. Basically the authors seeing that Skinner’s theories in behavioral psychology were undermined by his adherence to Darwinian explanations of evolution, specifically his ideas concerning Natural Selection. Upon examination of this it is shown that Natural Selection is tautological at best, and really offers no explanation as to how anything evolved. The authors throw this notion in with ideas about Santa Clause, the Tooth fairy, “the Selfish Gene” and God. Well I might object to them about their thoughts on God, but I found their reasoning concerning Natural Selection to be quite sound. Make no mistake, these men are not Christians or even theists, they are committed atheists. But they see a problem with the theory of evolution as it is normally presented and they are going to attack it, because in the end it is just a bad argument. In the end they go so far as to say there isn’t any theory of evolution. Well there are theories, it’s a matter of how valid those theories are, and the traditional theories have fallen on hard times, they just don’t hold water. In fact what Fodo andMassimo Piattelli-Palmarini show in this book is the same sort of thing expounded by James Shapiro in “Evolution: a View from the TwentyFirst Century” and Koonin in “The Logic of Chance”. It is really nothing new, Karl Popper tried to express the same sentiments quite a long time ago, and was severely lashed for it. But now it is coming to light that he was correct, and more and more scientists are coming to realize that the theory of evolution is untenable. The new trend is to try treat it as an historical phenomenon without much saying why or how it happened, just that it did. Infact, many of their peers originally reading the manuscript told them that no one was that kind of Evolutionist anymore, that is one who buys into Darwin and Natural Selection. Of course, that is just plain false, it may be that there are few wet biologists who think along these lines once they have their PHD, but one does not have to look far to find Darwinism being taught as fact. Fodor found his foil with Coyne, and Dawkins. And of course the stuff is still taught in schools, and one has to regurgitate the nonsense to pass college entrance exams and standardized testing. So the authors have done the world a favor in bringing their argumentation to publication. I found it to be a very insightful read.

2 comments:

BW said...

Rev. Erickson,

I, like you, am a Lutheran (LCMS) and am trying to get a better handle on this creation/evolution/intelligent design debate and you seem fairly well read in this area in your own quest for understanding. I was wondering what works would you recommend on this topic, like which of Karl Popper's, etc? I have read some of Thomas Nagel's work and found him interesting as well.

Thanks

Bror Erickson said...

Karl Popper, "The Myth of Framework" is the book in which I have found him questioning the validity of Darwinism.
This current quest started with Nagel. Thoroughly enjoyable read. I tried to read some of the other side. More or less that confirmed me in my previous position. This evolution thing is hog wash.