Further to “Philosopher of science: Schoolbook Darwinism needs replacement” (Witzany: All these concepts that dominated science for half a century are falsified now):
Over at University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog, we are informed,
Here’s why you can ignore Günther Witzany
Günther Witzany is one of those people who think the Modern Synthesis needs to be overthrown but he missed the real revolution that took place in the late 1960s. He’s part of The Third Way crowd that includes Denis Noble and Jim Shapiro [see Physiologists fall for the Third Way and The Third Fourth Way].
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He was not one of the Altenberg 16 but he clearly wants to be part of the outer circle. It’s not clear why anyone should consider him an expert on evolutionary biology.
Oh dear, Moran seems to have quite missed the point: The perspective of the critics of the modern synthesis—so far from being shunned—is now one that attracts an “outer circle.” Hardly the sign of a failing cause.
Second, the key reason this is happening is that evolutionary biology is now such a train wreck that one hardly needs to be an expert. Just being an eyewitness is enough.
Let’s keep our eye on Witzany. Maybe he’ll have an outer circle one day too.
Note: Moran also misses the point about interviewer Suzan Mazur, of whom he says dismissive things. When journalists who publish in key venues become interested in an otherwise obscure train wreck, we can reasonably suspect that a shift is taking place. That’ why we call it “news” and not “olds.”
Hat tip: Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, and The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry
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Unless “expert” is defined as someone who drinks the Kool Aid, it’s not clear why anyone should consider Moran an expert on evolutionary biology.
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LOL – one of those little gems that it’s easy to miss.
That’s it. The bolder voices created an inner circle. That’s making it safe for other joiners to casually align themselves. Moran talks about a Third Way and a Fourth Way. As the old synthesis collapses there’s a scramble for who is going to be the ruling elite among the jumble of speculations that arises to fill the gap.
One thing (among many) that kept the Darwin myth alive all this time was the retention of Darwin’s name in the title of the so-called theory. That was a rallying point and a great unifier. An illusion was created that all biologists are in complete agreement about the certainty of neo-Darwinian theory. Ironically, Mr. Moran himself has almost no use whatsoever for Darwinian mechanisms.
But if that illusion of unity breaks apart and the rebels and individualists get more attention, that doesn’t just kill Darwin. It splinters the entire evolutionary network into rival camps. Publicly, they’ll still try to admit that “there are no weaknesses in evolutionary theory” but some will eventually admit that they don’t know the mechanisms and they don’t have a coherent theory.
The last thing to fall will be common descent. That will remain the great unifier for a while.
I’m not really sure what this means. But do you seriously think mainstream evolutionary biology is failing? I suggest you read, say, Evolution, JEB, American Naturalist, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Geneticsor Molecular Ecology and count how many times the third wayers are cited. While you’re there look how much science is being done with evolutionary biology.
WD00 I’m not sure if you’re defending evolution or Moran but if you bring published papers into the battle Moran is eliminated early isn’t he? The credentials argument is so inconsistent.
I’m not talking about credentials at all.
If you only read UD you’d think mainstream evolutionary biology was a failing science, with the major underpinnings of field being called into question. I guess that’s what News meant by the quoted comment(?).
But that’s just wrong, as even a glance across specialist and general journals would make clear. So I’m curious as to how someone can gather and maintain such a skewed view of the science.
WD, ok i apologize. I misunderstood you.
wd400:
If you only read UD you’d think mainstream evolutionary biology was a failing science, with the major underpinnings of field being called into question. . ..
But that’s just wrong, as even a glance across specialist and general journals would make clear.
When evidence surfaces that completely contradicts the prevailing dogma, and the dogmatists simply “hand-wave” the evidence away, or shout down the “bearer of bad tidings” (e.g., Moran’s view of ENCODE), it becomes very hard to ‘fail.’ A “consensus” has been reached, no matter the evidence. And then the theory becomes, you might say, “too big to fail.”
Yet all the signs of how the theory now fails to connect to genomic evidence is there for anyone who wants to look without prejudice. The Copernicus Revolution, so called, took a hundred years to come about. It’s simply a matter of time.
Sounds familiar PaV, the always around the corner but totally goign to happen collapse of evolutionary biology.
wd400:
If you run the universities, and purge any contrary thought, it will take considerable time to overthrow the orthodoxy. That doesn’t make your position right.
You’re here, you say, because you want to learn about what kind of thinking sees the end of a science when, in fact, the scientific results support the current thinking of the science. I, OTOH, find it interesting that so many “unexpected” results don’t seem to destroy an ounce of your confidence in the science. But, you will die; and others will replace you—just like Darwin relied on winning over the youth in order to prevail. What goes around, comes around.
Evolution has been “about to collapse” for a lot longer than that. See G. R. Morton’s “The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism”:
PaV may attribute this to institutional inertia; others claim it’s due to conspiracy, philosophical bias, etc. But you really should consider that maybe the reason evolution has held on so long is that it’s you who is misjudging the evidence for it.
PaV: “The Copernicus Revolution, so called, took a hundred years to come about.”
Please tell me that you see the irony in this statement.
…and we get the conspiracy theory of science. The clock ticing down to my death is a new touch though.
OF course, none of this answer questions. Why is such a terrible science proving such a profitable paradigm? The journals I mentioned are full of papers using evolutionary biology to learn about the world, and indeed related feilds like genomics lean heavily on tools form evolutionary biology.
wd400′
Go see what Max Planck had to say about ‘scientific revolutions.’ And he had in mind the supposed “hard science” of physics.
As to the Journals, et. al: “junk in; junk out.” If you don’t have the proper theory with which to analyze experimental results, then what have you learned really?
At Phys.Org today there is a story about Lake Michigan perch, which have recovered in “decades,” and not in “centuries.” Where does the “century” time come from? A simulation which was run using “the notion that the selective pressures favoring delayed maturation are much weaker than the pressures exerted by intensive fishing.”
Ah, yes. Population genetics is wrong again. Oh, but no need to worry about that because “evolution is a fact,” and “neo-Darwinism” is alive. And the beat goes on . . .
wd
It can also good argument in support of religion. Hundreds of academic journals, theology schools and scholars, learning about the world, providing immense benefit for people in all cultures.
Have i either argued against religion SA? Or are you just making assumptions.
PaV, I’m afraid you are very boring on this topic. If someone choices the wrong assumptions when running a model in physics not (sane) person would claim that’s physics proved wrong. Just the assumption.
That was just food for thought, wd. Not an accusation of anything. I apologize if it came across that way.
The reason “evolutionary biology” doesn’t appear to be failing is because it explains observations that can also be explained by other paradigms. So therefore predictions it can make are predictions that other paradigms could make.
It also survives because it is observably true but erroneously extrapolated. And consequently because the advocates cannot wrap their head around natural selection with existing kinds of organisms does not equal a single celled organism changing to a multicellular one, and a multicellular one changing to Mozart or Einstein.
As I said in the other thread, neo-Darwinism, i.e. the modern synthesis, does not need to be extended, it needs to be buried.
Both Shapiro and Noble have a good overview of some of the main faults inherent in the assumptions of neo-Darwinism:
And although those faults outlined by Shapiro and Noble are good as far as they go for undermining neo-Darwinian claims, that is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg as far as the insurmountable problems with neo-Darwinism are concerned.
The main fault inherent in the assumptions of neo-Darwinism, and even the main fault inherent within the naturalistic theories that are seeking to either replace, or extend, neo-Darwinism, is the faulty philosophical assumption of reductive materialism.
Reductive materialism is an assumption that holds that information, consciousness, and an organism’s form are emergent from, or reducible to, a materialistic basis.
There simply is no empirical evidence whatsoever that any of those properties, i.e. information, consciousness, form, can possibly ’emerge’ from a material basis.
As to the property of information, unlike neo-Darwinism in which there is no rigid demarcation criteria, (at least no criteria that is broadly accepted by Darwinists), that would allow a person to go into the lab and potentially falsify neo-Darwinism by experiment, on the other hand, if a person could demonstrate just one instance in which unguided material processes generated non-trivial levels of functional information and/or complexity, it would falsify Intelligent Design as to being a ‘scientific’ theory.
And since it is, as Dr Behe pointed out, much easier to falsify Intelligent Design than it is to falsify neo-Darwinism, then that makes Intelligent Design scientific and makes neo-Darwinism “insert derogatory word of choice here”:
As to consciousness (and free will), this is perhaps the most direct falsification of the reductive materialistic claims of neo-Darwinists since it is falsified within our own personal lives.
As Nancy Pearcey pointed out in her recent book, “Finding Truth”, even leading materialists themselves many times honestly admit that they cannot live consistently within the reductive materialism they champion in their classrooms and papers:
And again, if it is impossible to live consistently within your wordlview, then that is rock solid proof that your worldview is not the correct description of reality:
In fact, unless free will is real, and is not an illusion as materialists hold, then science itself would not be possible:
Dr. Nelson humorously highlights the irrationality that is entailed in denying the reality of free will as materialists do:
And although Dr. Nelson alluded to writing an e-mail, (i.e. creating information), to tie his ‘personal agent’ argument into intelligent design, Dr. Nelson’s ‘personal agent’ argument can easily be amended to any action that ‘you’, as a personal agent, choose to take:
Dr. Craig Hazen, in the following video at the 12:26 minute mark, relates how he performed, for an audience full of academics at a college, a ‘miracle’ simply by raising his arm,,
What should be needless to say, if raising your arm is enough to refute your supposedly ‘scientific’ worldview of atheistic materialism, then perhaps it is time for you to seriously consider getting a new scientific worldview?
Moreover, it is not as if materialists are standing on solid empirical ground when they deny the reality of their own consciousness (and free will). Many leading materialists themselves readily admit that they have no clue how consciousness can possibly emerge from a material basis
Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Sebastian Seung makes this clear in his book “Connectome,” saying:
There is simply no direct evidence that anything material is capable of generating consciousness. As Rutgers University philosopher Jerry Fodor says,
As Nobel neurophysiologist Roger Sperry wrote,
From modern physics, Nobel prize-winner Eugene Wigner (who was not a materialist) agreed:
Contemporary physicist Nick Herbert states,
Physician and author Larry Dossey wrote:
In fact, we have very good principled reasons for believing that it is impossible for consciousness to ever ’emerge’ from a material basis:
As to the inability of ‘form’ to be explained by reductive materialism, Stephen Meyer states it succinctly as such:
Many more notes an the inability of ‘form’ to be explained by reductive materialistic explanations are gone over in the following post:
Supplemental note:
Thus, since the reductive materialism that neo-Darwinism is built upon is grossly inadequate to explain information, consciousness and form, then, as mentioned in my first sentence of this post, neo-Darwinism, i.e. the modern synthesis, does not need to be extended, it needs to be buried.
Verse and Music:
This differs very much from News’ view of the world. And sounds more YEC-like than ID (which is meant to be a scientific alternative/objection to evolutionary biology, is it not?)
Exactly which experimental observation has ever been made that has confirmed neo-Darwinian claims that unguided material processes can create non-trivial functional complexity/information over and above what is already present in life?
As to tremendous plasticity observed in animal breeding, such as dog breeding, the variations all occur from a loss of genetic information. i.e. Neo-Darwinism doesn’t even need to apply for the job of being the proper explanation for animal breeding since it is a loss of preexisting information and since animal breeding has been around for thousands of years before Darwin ever came along:
wd400:
If someone choices the wrong assumptions when running a model in physics not (sane) person would claim that’s physics proved wrong. Just the assumption.
A very hard sentence to try to make sense of.
Implicit in your logic, by way of analogy, is the statement: “Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.” This is religious fundamentalism, not science.
Never has a greater, nor higher, “ivory tower” been erected.