Readers will recall James Shapiro, author of Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. Bill Dembski asked him, based on his observations, Why aren’t you a design theorist?
Which, in the context, is somewhat like asking, “Well, if you agree with me about how badly things are run down at City Hall, will you join Citizens for Municipal Reform?”
Well, Shapiro replied, giving his objections, and now Biologic Institute’s Doug Axe has replied to Shapiro here:
I think we all agree that science should be the arbiter here. Naturalism and ID both make testable claims about how things happen in the real world, so it ought to be possible to evaluate these positions by evaluating their respective claims.
If crutches are devices for propping up lame positions, then I completely agree that they should go, but let’s be careful to call a crutch a crutch. As an ID proponent, I’ve put forward the scientific case for thinking that the thousands of distinct structures that enable protein molecules to perform their specific tasks inside cells cannot have arisen in a Darwinian way. Moreover, the facts of this problem seem to preclude any naturalistic solution, Darwinian or not.
Shapiro is looking for a no-Darwin but no-intelligence solution. Does it exist?
Also, Axe’s senior scientist Ann Gauger offer some thoughts on Dembski’s questions here.
0 to 60 quick, on Shapiro:
Antibiotic resistance: The non-Darwin truth
“Four kinds of rapid, multi-character evolutionary changes Darwin could not have imagined”
“Key non-Darwinian Evolutionary Scientists in the 20th Century”
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