Michael Denton is the author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (for which he is said to be working on a sequel). 3:00 EST:
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #761 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #9 in Movies & TV > DVD > Documentary
As his bio page at Discovery Institute explains,
He has long adhered to a structuralist view of organic form, seeing much of the underlying order of life to be immanent in nature, the result of higher organizational principles or ‘laws of form’ which constrain the behaviour of complex higher order assemblages of biomatter. As he argues, because these organizational principles or laws are emergent, and only manifest by their influence on ‘higher order assemblages,’ they cannot be inferred from analysis of the individual molecular components or parts of living systems analyzed in isolation and consequently pose a severe challenge to the reductionist agenda. Darwinism is also challenged because they represent emergent causal agencies which are immanent in nature and have nothing to do with natural selection. Moreover as Denton stresses: “Emergent features of any composite or whole (like the properties of water) are only manifest when the components of the composite (hydrogen and oxygen) are ‘combined together.’ Because of this, they cannot be the result of cumulative Darwinian selection which is by definition a gradualistic process which can only build order bit by bit. Selection may choose and conserve the emergent properties of a whole but it cannot create them in the first place.”
The half-hour documentary is available at Amazon on DVD (Blu-ray to follow shortly).
Here’s Evolution News & Views’s intro:
The new documentary Privileged Species opens very dramatically with Bill “Science Guy” Nye addressing an American Humanist Association conference. To laughter and applause, Mr. Nye riffs on how being human means being no more than a mere “speck” in the universe.
I’m insignificant. … I am just another speck of sand. And the Earth really in the cosmic scheme of things is another speck. And the sun is an unremarkable star. Nothing special about the sun. The sun is another speck. And the galaxy is a speck. I’m a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.
…
On one hand there is Denton, who talks in Privileged Species about how “The human form is something significant in the cosmic order,” adding that that is a “scientific finding,” not a subjective judgment but an objective one, as objective as the unique properties of carbon, oxygen, and water. And then there is Nye, who says, in effect, “Human life sucks.” Unfortunately that is not Bill Nye’s lone, idiosyncratic view but one widely shared in and broadcast by the scientific and media communities.
Watch and decide.
Here’s the film’s site and here’s the trailer: