A colleague sent me this. I’d like to ask contributors to this thread to list other books published before the advent of the ID movement that, like this, were (1) non-religiously motivated and (2) regarded conventional evolutionary theory as “a fairy tale for adults.”
“A Biologist’s View,” Jean Rostand, Wm. Heinemann Ltd., 1956.
French biologist Jean Rostand–“one of the leading European biologists,”
according to the jacket of this 1956 book–hardly fits the popular stereotype
of an intelligent design activist. He writes, for example: “I am quite
incapable of taking seriously a ‘revelation’ supposedly made to our ancestors
in the remote past,” and “I believe firmly in the evolution of organic nature,”
and again “the only kind of truth I believe in is one discovered slowly and
painfully.” Yet Rostand rejects Darwinism (calling it “a fairy tale for
adults” in another reference), and writes, “a theory of evolution…must
account…for the harmony which is found in living structures. This harmony
is admittedly not perfect but it is quite sufficient to suggest the idea
of design or intention–of purpose, in fact.” Further, he says, “though
we may know nothing of the actual variations which have made evolution,
this need not stop us from making a mental picture of them…they must be
supposed to be creative and not random.” He discusses the possibility that
this “creativeness” may originate from within the living organisms
themselves, and never considers the possibility of a external designer.Because of his philosophical leanings, Rostand might (or might not)
object to the inclusion of his book in this list, but in fact he
illustrates nicely that the conclusion that the development of life
suggests design does not flow from religious preconceptions, but from the
evidence itself.
Pierre-Paul Grasse. Evolution of Living Organisms.
Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth.
Paul S. Moorhead. Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.
Fred Hoyle. Mathematics of Evolution.
Periannan Senapathy. Independent Birth of Organisms.
David Stove. Darwinian Fairytales.
Graeme Donald Snooks. The Collapse of Darwinism : Or The Rise of a Realist Theory of Life.
Not all of these may predate the IDM.
The most notable book to my mind was by the mentor of Nobel Laureate Theodosius Dobzhanski, namelely, Leo Berg, author of Nomogenesis. It had many ID-like arguments, that evolution was non-random. It described the problems of irreducible complexity, morphological novelty and convergence. It was written in 1926!
See this interesting pub-med abstract about Nomogenesis in 1987 Molecular biology, darwinism and nomogenesis
Here is the theory in some of Berg’s own words.
Berg anticpates ideas with front loaded evolution, in regards to phylogeny and ontogeny:
I credit Davison with brining this work to my attention. Actually, pretty much all of the bibliographies of John Davison’s work are driven by pre-modern-ID thinkers who rejected Darwinism for scientific reasons and who were not affiliated with theological arguments.
See:
http://www.uvm.edu/~jdavison/d.....festo.html
Some of the other names of the scientists will be familiar already, such as Goldscmidt and DeGrasse.
For example, Goldschmidt wrote of:
Unfortunately, his hopeful monsters, sounded like fairytales as well!
But nonetheless he writes:
From a colleague:
How about the work of Sheldrake, who essentially proposes that information-containing “fields” (I think he calls them “morphic fields”) are the mechanism through which the development of individual organisms occur. More importantly for evolution, though, these fields have the capacity to collect new information from the species in question (say a changed foraging behavior based upon new environmental conditions, etc.) and once that behavior has been repeated a sufficient number of times, the field is altered by it, and then reacts back upon matter by changing the form of the species to reflect this new behavior. It is basically Lamarkian, which makes it dear to my heart, and it takes into account the primary place of information.
This is a good venue for clearing up a widespread misconception about the Jean Rostand quotation (“Evolution is a fairy tale for adults.â€Â). In my travels across the internet I have found that most creationist quote collections erroneously attribute the Rostand quotation to Professor Louis Bounoure. The Rostand quotation is apparently from the February 1959 issue of Age Nouveau (p. 12). A tip of the hat to E.T. Babinski at Talk Origins for the excellent sleuthing he did on this matter. See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/3/part12.html.
How literally do you want us to take the “fairy tale for adults” requirement, lol?
Evolution – A Theory in Crisis by Dr. Michael Denton
Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, Philadelphia, 1967)
Evolution From Space, by Fred Hoyle and N.C. Wickramasinghe
surprisingly little if any attention at all is given by IDists to the following books:
Francis Hitching: The Neck of the Giraffe subtitled or where
Darwin went wrong.
Hitchings’s book came out in ’81/’82 and came out in favour of the self-organisational school on evolution. His book was critical of both Darwinians and Creationists. Hitching was a well-known academic in the UK and wrote books on a number of mystery related subjects. He is deceased.
Gordon R Taylor: The Great Evolution Mystery
This book also came out in about ’82. Taylor was a well-knonw British science writer and this book was published posthumously. Taylor died in ’81. It was his last work. Taylor believed in common descent and Lamarckian inheritance of a sort and was in many ways a staunch defender of Darwin…to a point. However his book points out numerous problems in evolution where neo-Darwinism simply hits a brick wall. There are many interesting little discussed details in the history of the field of evolution and Taylor points out problems for Darwinism that are often neglected by IDists.
Michael Pitman: Adam and Evolution
The title of this book which came out in about ’84 is very misleading. This is not a Creationist tract in the traditional YEC sense. Pitman was a Cambridge University biologist and one of the most well-known critics of Darwinism in the UK prior to the advent of the ID movement proper. This little-known and unjustly neglected book needs a serious look-in by IDists. Pitman pointed out so many problems for neo-Darwinism across numerous disciplines in biology. Arguably most well-known for pointing out seemingly insurmountable problems for Darwinism in cetacean evolution. His writings on the fairy tale of whale evolution have been inexcusably overlooked by IDists – he did not just tread over well-worn ground here but came up with original arguments, see his writings on the fairy tale of the evolution of the whale’s tail (or is that tale?) in light of cetacean anatomy. He pointed out other problems for Darwinism that probably because of the obscurity of his book, have not been picked up by IDists really. Highly recommended. I am 95% sure Pitman is deceased.
Somebody above mentions Sheldrake, an interesting figure who if anything finds himself at the cross-roads of the ID movement and the Darwinians. His ’81 book A New Science of Life putting forward his theory of morphic resonance/formative causation was unambiguously anti-materialist and his book was attacked in the pages of Nature by then-senior editor John Maddox as a book “fit for burning”. Ironically this helped to put Sheldrake’s book and work in the spotlight and contributed to its good sales!
Shattering the Myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton, a British science writer, seems to have originally been copyrighted in 1992.
This book got me really excited before I ever heard of ID or any of the well-known ID works, precisely because he was able to argue against Darwinism without recourse to religious backup or a priori religious assumptions and motivations.
A list of non-religious scientists, philosophers, researchers etc from 1880 – 2011 who have opposed Darwinism. Most of them were/are non-Darwinian evolutionists who in most cases have criticised the Darwinian mechanisms of evolution. None of them creationist or religious motivated:
Austin Hobart Clark – The New Evolution: Zoogenesis
Robert Broom – The coming of man: was it accident or design?
Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth.
Paul S. Moorhead. Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.
Fred Hoyle. Mathematics of Evolution.
Periannan Senapathy. Independent Birth of Organisms.
David Stove. Darwinian Fairytales.
Graeme Donald Snooks. The Collapse of Darwinism : Or The Rise of a Realist Theory of Life.
Leo Berg. Nomogenesis
Olan Hyndman. The Origin of Life and the Evolution of Living Things
Michael Denton. Evolution – A Theory in Crisis
Evolution From Space, by Fred Hoyle and N.C. Wickramasinghe
Francis Hitching: The Neck of the Giraffe subtitled or where Darwin went wrong.
Gordon R Taylor: The Great Evolution Mystery
Michael Pitman: Adam and Evolution
Shattering the Myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton
A Biologist’s View. Jean Rostand
Lee Spetner – Not By Chance
Rupert Sheldrake – A New Science of Life
David Swift – Evolution Under the microscope
Richard Goldschmidt – The material basis of evolution
Evolution theory: The Unfinished synthesis – Robert G. B Reid
Biological Emergences – Robert G. B. Reid
Darwin Retried – Norman Macbeth
Darwinism: A time for funerals – Norman Macbeth
Beyond Natural Selection – Robert Wesson
Darwin’s blind spot: Evolution beyond natural selection – Frank Ryan
What Darwin Got wrong – Jerry Fordor and Piattelli-Palmarini
Acquiring Genomes: The theory of the origins of the species – Lynn Margulis
Development and evolution: Complexity and change in Biology – Stanley Salthe
Evolution Without Selection – Lima-de-Faria
The ages of Gaia – James Lovelock
The Genomic Potential Hypothesis – Christian Schwabe
William Fix – Bone Peddlers
Darwin was wrong: A study in probabilities – I. L. Cohen
James Le Fanu – Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves
Stuart Pivar – On the Origin of Form: Evolution by Self-Organization
Edward J. Steele – Lamarck’s Signature : How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin’s Natural Selection Paradigm
H. P. Blavatsky – The Secret Doctrine
Rudolf Steiner – Cosmic Memory
Bruce Lipton – The Biology of Belief
Rupert Sheldrake – A New Science of Life
Richard Spilsbury – Providence Lost: Critique of Darwinism
Arthur Koestler – The Case of the Midwife Toad
Amit Goswami – Creative Evolution: A Physicist’s Resolution Between Darwinism and Intelligent Design
James A. Shapiro – Evolution: A View from the 21st Century
Mae-Wan Ho – Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An Introduction to the New Evolutionary Paradigm
Lot’s of early evolutionary scientists were non-Darwinians.
The geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan in the preface for his book Evolution and Adaptation (1903) wrote;
As you can see he gave natural selection a small role, but did not believe it was fundamental in evolution. He compared Darwinism to a dogma.
Here is the geneticist Reginald Punnett in the introduction of his book Mimicry In Butterflies (1915).
Punnett was pointing out how natural selection became an answer for everything by the Darwinists. Natural selection claimed to explain everything therefore it explained nothing, it become a philosophical argument rather than scientific. Most of the Darwinians had no interest in really going into nature and testing new hypotheses.
Here is one more. Robert Broom in his book Finding the Missing Link (1950) near the end of the book wrote;
Broom compared religious creationism to Darwinism as both contain dogma. Interesting quotes. It’s a shame the views of these scientists were mostly ignored by both the creationists and the Darwinists.
This is an interesting quote from the book “Darwinism to-day a discussion of present-day scientific criticism of the Darwinian selection theories, together with a brief account of the principal other proposed auxiliary and alternative theories of species-forming” (1907) by Vernon L. Kellogg;
The book lists hundreds of scientists who accepted evolution but rejected Darwinism.
TE do you happen to know how the author defined Darwinism in this exchange?
Upright BiPed the author Vernon L. Kellogg defined Darwinism as basically Darwin’s mechanisms of evolution which was three main mechanisms – natural selection, sexual selection and his theory of pangenesis.
He makes it clear that although Darwin accepted descent, common descent should not be described as “Darwinian” as many scientists accepted it before Darwin.
Kellogg is also clear before he starts the book that both sexual selection and pangenesis have been universally discredited. Most people would know this about pangenesis but would be surprised to hear this about sexual selection, but truth is sexual selection was rejected by the scientific community until the 1960s and early 70s. That’s the history but not many people know it.
On page 2 of the book he writes;
On page 3 is a section called Darwinism not synonymous with evolution, and included is the quote I listed in my previous post where he makes it clear Darwinism is just a group of mechanisms of evolution and should not be confused with common descent or organic evolution.
The book was written in 1907 at the peak of what has been called the “The eclipse of Darwinism”, a period prior to the modern evolutionary synthesis when evolution was widely accepted by scientists but relatively few biologists believed that natural selection was its primary mechanism.
I noticed Soren Lovtup was already mentioned by other users on this thread. His book “Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth” is extremely hard to get hold of. But what many people don’t seem to have picked up on, is that Lovtrup contributed an essay to the book Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An Introduction to the New Evolutionary Paradigm edited by Mae-Wan Ho which all included chapters from other neo-Darwinian critics such as Brian Goodwin. The book was written in 1984, is easy to get hold of but has been totally ignored!
Lovtrup also had an essay published in the book Alternative life-history styles of animals edited by Michael N. Bruton which included many non-Darwinian ideas and mechanisms of evolution such as saltational mechanisms of the ichthyologist Eugene K. Balon. Again the book totally ignored.
Balon himself has published many non-Darwinian papers. See his paper Evolution by Epigenesis: Farewell to Darwinism, Neo-and Otherwise. Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum 97: 269-312. The paper is not anti-evolution but anti-Darwinian, and Balon cites the work of Jonathan Wells approvingly in his paper! Once again, this paper seems to have been forgotten about sadly. It’s a shame none of these non-Darwinian evolutionary books or papers get more coverage.
As for Soren Lovtrup the Neo-Darwinists ridiculed his theories and claimed no scientists supported his work, but this is false. Balon has supported Lovtrup and Lovtrup’s book Epigenetics, A Treatise on Theoretical Biology received a positive review by E. O. Wiley (Systematic Zoology, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Jun., 1977), pp. 238-243).
Mae-Wan Ho contributed to another textbook that was critical of Neo-Darwinism and calling for a new evolutionary synthesis. The book was called Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors, it was published in 1988. Here is a description of the book.
Like the others, the book was ignored. But the book costs around $100 so you can understand why in this case.
Eugene K. Balon had one of his papers criticising Neo-Darwinism published in “Environment, Development, and Evolution: Toward a Synthesis (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology)” published in 2003 with other scientists such as Brian K. Hall and Gerd B. Müller. Balon appears to be the only full blown critic of Neo-Darwinism but the others have all discussed the limitations of Neo-Darwinism and called for an extended evolutionary synthesis based on findings in Evolutionary Developmental Biology.
Another forgotten critic of Darwinism is Samuel Butler. Not a scientist, but he knew a lot about biology and the history of evolution. He wrote a number of books supporting a form of teleological Lamarckism and works on biological memory. It seems some of his research influenced Rupert Sheldrake.
Vernon L. Kellogg in a paper entitled “Samuel Butler and Biological Memory” described Butler’s evolutionary views.
Science, New Series, Vol. 35, No. 907 (May 17, 1912), pp. 769-771.
Another forgotten critic of Darwinism:
Emanuel Rádl
“We may therefore sum up the modern position in Driesch’s words: ‘For those with insight Darwinism has been dead for a long time’… Darwinism as a tyrannic doctrine, which imperiously enchains the minds of men, is dead.”
—Rádl. The History of Biological Theories. (1930). p. 388
His book can be found online here:
http://archive.org/stream/hist.....5/mode/2up
A book similar to “Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An Introduction to the New Evolutionary Paradigm” edited by Mae-Wan Ho was “Evolutionary Theory: Paths Into the Future” edited by Jeffrey W. Pollard (a non-Darwinian who had supported the controversial neo-Lamarckian experiments of Ted Steele). It was a compilation of anti-Darwinian essays by scientists and philosophers. A description of the book;
As you can see, Karl Popper contributed to it. This was after his supposed public recantation as the book was published in 1984. Not many people know about this publication but it proves that Popper had doubts about Darwinism despite what the Darwinists on Talk.Origins may believe.
Another forgotten about critique of the neo-Darwinian synthesis was The Adaptive Seascape: The Mechanism of Evolution by David J. Merrell (1994).
Back to the subject of Samuel Butler, I have done some further research. I would consider him an early design theorist who accepted evolution.
Felix Grendon “Samuel Butler’s God”. The North American Review, Vol. 208, No. 753 (Aug., 1918), pp. 277-286.
I am surprised Michael A. Flannery has not picked up on the views of Butler. He’s definitely worth looking into by ID theorists.
Just read this rare and forgotten paper. The Evolutionary Dys-Synthesis: Which Bottles for Which Wine? by Janis Antonovics.
The American Naturalist, Vol. 129, No. 3 (Mar., 1987), pp. 321-331.
An interesting conclusion. Highlighted points from the paper;
Brian Goodwin “How the Leopard Changed Its Spots : The Evolution of Complexity” (2001).
Goodwin also contributed a chapter on morphogenetic fields in the book Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An Introduction to the New Evolutionary Paradigm (1984) by Mae-Wan Ho.
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson author of the pioneering work on structuralism “On Growth and Form” (1917) also essayed an anti-Darwinian paper in 1884. It was entitled “Some Difficulties of Darwinism” and gave examples why natural selection is inadequate for the origin of biological form.
I’ve been a huge fan of Goodwin’s work for a while. I suppose that’s one reason why I don’t like being called a “Darwinist,” if “Darwinism” is the sort of thing that excludes Goodwin’s approach.
TheisticEvolutionist, if you have university-level library access, see if you can find “Darwinism: Six Scientific Alternatives” by Pete A. Y. Gunter (The Pluralist, Vol. 1, No. 1 (SPRING 2006), pp. 13-30.) It’s available through JSTOR but I don’t think JSTOR is accessible to civilians. I highly recommend Gunter’s article!
Thanks,
I have read that article. I think it is slightly misleading though. The alternatives he lists are not alternatives to Darwinism (natural selection) they seem to be criticism or extensions of neo-Darwinism modern synthesis.
He lists quantum evolution, nonlinear evolution, self-organizational theories of evolution etc. His section on neo-Lamarckian “epigenetics” is misleading. Scientists like Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb are Darwinists who have called for an extended synthesis for epigenetics not an alternative to Darwinism.
Johnjoe McFadden and his work on Quantum Evolution is not an alternative to Darwinism. McFadden himself has admitted to being a Darwinist. Like I already stated, he’s calling for some kind of extended evolutionary synthesis not presenting an alternative to natural selection.
Brian Goodwin was probably the most “non-Darwinian” scientist mentioned in the paper. Conclusion from the article;
He’s correct about the plurality of evolutionary alternatives to Darwinism. I will suggest some other papers in my further posts.
Fleeming Jenkin wrote a critical review The Origin of Species in 1867.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleeming_Jenkin
Jenkin raised some serious objections to natural selection. You can read some of his objections here:
http://www.viu.ca/liberalstudi.....jenkin.asp
The following is from the book “Evolution” by Ernest MacBride (1927).
“A very popular idea is that Darwin has completely explained evolution and that the hypotheses of “natural selection” and “sexual selection” successfully account for all the varied peculiarities of structure and function which we see around us. A little critical consideration will, we think, convince our readers that, so far from this being the case, Darwin’s theory is in reality no explanation at all, but one great and striking instance of the common illusion of what one of our best contemporary philosophers calls “reification” of words – i.e., the conversion of mere general terms into imaginary things.
That every species does in reality produce far more young than can survive is open to no possible kind of doubt. One simple instance of this will suffice. The common thrush lives on an average ten years. It begins to breed at the age of one year, and produces every summer two broods of nestlings, each consisting of four young. In the course of their lives, therefore, a single pair of thrushes bring into the world eighty young, and some of these may be breeding for nine years before the parents die. Since the whole population of thrushes remains about the same from generation to generation, it is obvious that only two of this vast army of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren can survive their parents; all the rest come to an untimely end.
But to put the matter in a nutshell, the fact that James is killed can make no difference to the structure of Tom.
The implicit assumption in Darwin’s hypothesis is that continuous inheritable variation occurs constantly in all directions. But to assume this is really to beg the whole question. Variation is not a single thing but a collective term for a whole lot of different things. Continuous variation in any direction is evolution, and it is precisely this which has proved to exist, and, if possible, to be explained. Natural selection is the pruning-knife which trims the buds of the tree of life, but it does not account for the sprouting of the buds nor for the directions in which they tend to grow.”
MacBride was an Irish marine biologist and zoologist. He was a supporter of Lamarckian evolution.
Here’s a rather newish book that was published. It has gone rather un-noticed! I did see only review which described it as similar to the work of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson.
Randomness in Evolution by John Tyler Bonner (2013)
A book I have been reading recently is “Cell and Psyche: The Biology of Purpose” by Edmund W. Sinnott. It was published in 1950.
Sinnott in his early career published a mainstream textbook on genetics, in his mid-to late career however he seemed to have shifted from mainstream work on plant genetics to discussing the mysteries of metamorphosis, the cell and the mind-body problem. He supported purpose in all biological organisms at all levels of life even down to the cell. I guess he supported a form of holistic panpsychism. His book received a positive review if the The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Mar., 1952), p. 62.
Here is a description of his hypothesis from the review;
Sinnott published other books and articles supporting a teleological view of evolution. Some of his work has obviously influenced by Rupert Sheldrake.
A similar writer was Wilfred Eade Agar. He was both anti-Darwinian and anti-Lamarckian, he was most famous for challenging the Lamarckian findings of William McDougall relating to the inheritance of the effects of training in rats. He published the book “A Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism” (1943). Similar to Sinnott it’s a book that talks about purpose in the organism.
William McDougall was a Lamarckian and anti-Darwinist. I have read two of his books. He supported a teleological view where the organism directs its own evolution. This type of Lamarckian evolution was similar to later writers such as Arthur Koestler who wrote a few anti-Darwinist books in the 1970s (The Case of the Midwife Toad, Janus: A Summing Up) attacking the purposeless view of neo-Darwinism.
Wilfred Eade Agar also published an article entitled “The concept of Purpose in Biology” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Sep., 1938), pp. 255-273. He has a very interesting section on purpose on morphogenesis and mentions morphogenetic fields. This was in 1938. I consider many of Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas second-hand. Sheldrake still a brilliant writer full of original ideas, but many people are unaware that scientists proposed similar theories before him about fields influencing evolution and development of the organism.
Edmund W. Sinnott seems to of had some very similar views to myself. I just discovered a review of his book “The Biology of the Spirit” (1955). Here’s part of the review from The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Jun., 1956), p. 120. I highly recommend this book.
Another interesting book is “Biology Revisioned” (1998) by Elizabet Sahtouris.
Sahtouris is a non-Darwinian evolutionist who has promoted a radical version of the Gaia hypothesis. Description of the book;
Here is Sahtouris from an interview commenting on Darwinism.
http://www.scottlondon.com/int.....ouris.html
Recent book by Professor of biology Masatoshi Nei “Mutation-Driven Evolution” (2013)
The idea that mutation is the driving force of evolution and natural selection only secondary is not new. This theory was presented as a non-Darwinian alternative before the modern synthesis and was supported by scientists like Thomas Hunt Morgan (who I already mentioned) and William Bateson (Bateson was a saltationist).
An overlooked paper I found;
Neo-rationalism versus neo-Darwinism: Integrating development and evolution by Kelly C. Smith.
http://link.springer.com/conte.....130061.pdf
Another paper that has already been mentioned on this website “The Fate of Darwinism: Evolution after the Modern Synthesis” by David J. Depew.
David J. Depew. “The Fate of Darwinism: Evolution after the Modern Synthesis” Biological Theory 6.1 (2011): 89-102.
Rose MR, Oakley TH “The new biology: beyond the Modern Synthesis” Biology Direct 2007, 2:30.
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/30
In the above paper see the section “Dead parts of the Modern Synthesis”.
Mae Wan Ho and Peter Saunders in their paper “Beyond neo-Darwinism an epigenetic approach to evolution”.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s.....9379901917
Interesting paper on self-organization challenging Darwinism.
The uniqueness of biological self-organization:
challenging the Darwinian paradigm by J. B. Edelmann and M. J. Denton
http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teac.....n.2007.pdf
Evolution in Revolution: A Paradigm shift in our understanding of life and biological evolution by František Baluška
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC3204118/
These books may be of interest to readers here at UD. Both take influences from Goethe and non-Darwinian evolution.
Development Dynamics in Humans and Other Primates: Discovering Evolutionary Principles through Comparative Morphology by Jos Verhulst
Thinking Beyond Darwin: The Idea of the Type As a Key to Vertebrate Evolution by Ernst-Michael Kranich
And here is a description from a review of the book;
Which totally fits the description of this thread! It is a shame such books have been ignored and mostly forgotten about.
Not many people know this one. The philosopher Richard Spilsbury published a book called “Providence Lost : A Critique of Darwinism” in 1974 and some of the arguments are similar to the book by Thomas Nagel in the book “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False” published in 2012… of course people about Nagel but Spilsbury is virtually unknown!
Neophenogenesis: A developmental theory of phenotypic evolution by Timothy D. Johnston and Gilbert Gottlieb
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s.....9305802607
It appears the Journal of Theoretical Biology published many non-Darwinian papers in the 80s and early 90s. Also see the papers I listed above from Mae Wan-Ho which were also published in the same journal.
Eugene Koonin and his book has been mentioned here at UD in some other threads but his papers have not been mentioned.
In his book The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (2011) Koonin wrote;
Here are two of his papers;
Eugene Koonin, The Origin at 150: Is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight?” Trends in Genetics, 25(11), November 2009, pp. 473-475 and Eugene Koonin, Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics, Nucleic Acids Research, 37(4), 2009, pp. 1011-1034.
Links to his papers;
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC2784144/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC2651812/
It would be incorrect to all Koonin a non-Darwinian, he describes himself as a Darwinist, yet is critical of neo-Darwinism which he believes has crumbled.
He calls for a new evolutionary synthesis that invokes Darwinian, Lamarckian and saltational mechanisms and processes.
The paper Dissecting Darwinism by Joseph A. Kuhn was discussed on this website a few years ago but what was overlooked what Kuhn’s comments on John Hunter.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC3246854/
As discussed, John Hunter developed a theory of evolution before Darwin. But what is not widely known is that Darwin plagiarized many of his ideas from Hunter. This is discussed in detail in the book “The Illustrious Hunter and the Darwins” by science historian WJ Dempster.
Beyond Natural Selection by Robert Wesson
An interesting book that I have read a few times. It received terrible reviews in science journals but both Lynn Margulis and Elisabet Sahtouris said positive things about the book. It’s best strength is the amount of biological anomalies it mentions that natural selection fails to explain.
A mostly forgotten book “The Origins of Life: Evolution as Creation” by Hoimar von Ditfurth.
This was a theistic evolution book that was compared to the work of Asa Gray. The book came out before the modern ID movement. Generally a poor book, if I can remember correctly only near the end of the book did the author argue that evolution *may* have been programmed during a supernatural first cause that started the Big Bang.
Another interesting forgotten book that came out at a similar time to some of the authors in the modern ID movement in America in the 80s was the book “Origins of Life” by Jim Brooks. I am not quite sure if Brooks was a theistic evolutionist or an old earth creationist but his book was a debunking of various naturalistic theories of the origin of life, he did reject a strict literal reading of the Bible but he was a Christian. The book came out a year after “The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories” by Walter L. Bradley and Charles B. Thaxton. I would recommend it to any ID theorist.
Another interesting anti-Darwinian book “The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism” (1982) by Brian Leith. If I get the time I may summarize some of the evidence he documented. Similar to Soren Lovtrup’s books this one was a full blown criticism of Neo-Darwinism.
In his book “Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia” Tom Frame wrote;
The only one of those I have not read is the one by Fred Hoyle, seems it is out-of-print and hard to locate.
An interesting old book I obtained from a second-hand bookstore recently was “Mind and Its Mechanism: With Special Reference to Ideo-Motor Action, Hypnosis, Habit and Instinct and the Lamarckian Theory of Evolution” (1927) by two psychologists Paul Bousfield and W. R. Bousfield.
The books last chapter entitled “Evolution” supported a strict neo-Lamarckian view of evolution. The authors cited the work of William McDougall on rats and the experiments of Paul Kammerer to support the view that acquired characteristics are inherited.
Unfortunately both the Kammerer and McDougall experiments are known to have contained serious flaws. There is an overview on Wikipedia of many other “neo-Lamarckian” experiments in the early 1900s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.....Lamarckism
The work of the British marine biologist Joseph Thomas Cunningham is mentioned. Cunningham was a devout Lamarckian who published a number of anti-Darwinian books.
Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution by William McDougall (1929)
McDougall a Lamarckian supported a teleological view of evolution in opposition to neo-Darwinism. In the book he claimed the mechanism of acquired characters was immaterial. This reminds me of the morphic resonance of Rupert Sheldrake who cited the work of Mcdougall in his book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance.
The Collapse of Darwinism: Or The Rise of a Realist Theory of Life by Graeme D. Snooks
Another early forgotten critic of neo-Darwinism was the English botanist John Christopher Willis author of the book “The Course of Evolution by Differentiation Or Divergent Mutation Rather Than by Selection” (1940). His also proposed the controversial anti-Darwinian “Age and Area hypothesis”.
The book can be found online here;
http://archive.org/stream/cour.....5/mode/2up
Make’s a very compelling argument for the inadequacy of natural selection. Willis was a saltationist. His views similar in some ways to Richard Goldschmidt on mutationism.
The German zoologist Theodor Eimer (a proponent of orthogenesis) published an attack on natural selection titled “On Orthogenesis: And the Impotence of Natural Selection in Species Formation” (1898).
The book can be found online here;
http://archive.org/stream/onor.....2/mode/2up
He also was a Lamarckian and wrote the book “Organic Evolution as the Result of the inheritance of Acquired Characters according to the Laws of Organic Growth” (1888).
It is a shame such works have been forgotten, they have some very useful evidence against Darwinism.