From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views:
However, a forthcoming book by biologist J. Scott Turner, Purpose & Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, is a real shot across the bow. Dr. Turner’s last book, from Harvard University Press, was The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself. The new book, from HarperOne, is aimed not at an academic audience but straight at the broadest thoughtful reading public.
Turner is a delightful, clear, and highly engaging writer, and he sets out his argument against smug Darwinism forthrightly. As he shows, biology itself is in crisis, having failed to grapple with the enigma of what life really is. More.
J. Scott Turner still has a job in forest biology at a New York State U in Syracuse. One hopes he is not required to make stupid remarks for several years in order to keep it.
Question: Why do life forms seek to survive? In a way that boulders do not seek to avoid becoming gravel. What does it even mean to “seek” something?
We are not here concerned with intelligence as such because the seeking appears implicit in life forms, irrespective of their developed intelligence (or apparent lack thereof). It is not something that life forms somehow evolved slowly, or not that we know of anyway.
Magical claims for explicitly Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation produces all the changes we see) takes that fact for granted. It’s time someone asked.
See also: Animal minds: In search of the minimal self
and
What the fossils told us in their own words