Chiroptera
quote:
there are still a couple of nutcakes on this board who insists that natural selection isn't enough to drive evolution, but they're kind of vague on what exactly the driving force is
Many Darwin defenders these days admit that “natural selection” might not be adequate to organize a bunch of genetic accidents into complex biological structures, but that modern evolutionary theory includes “other things”, but are kind of vague on what exactly the “other things” do. ID does not question common descent. It questions RM&NS as the driving force behind evolution.
The Endogenous Adaptive Mutagenesis view of evolution suggests that biological change does not originate in genomes, it originates in individual responsive, adaptive organisms. All organisms have some ability to change, override instincts, and adapt. Used organs develop and unused ones atrophy. Adaptations are inherited epigenetically, as they develop and are only encoded into the genome if persistent over generations. An instinct is nothing more than a memory. Just as no one has located a “stored” memory in a brain, I predict no one will ever locate a “stored” instinct in a genome. Following is an excerpt from an article no longer available on the web.
quote:
Not only does memory account for the inheritance of living adaptations, it eliminates the need for a blueprint from which the body is mechanically constructed. Instead of following a pre-planned design, whether theological or genetic, the embryo simply mimics the developmental steps of its ancestors. And in contrast to the determinism of both creationist and neo-Darwinian ideology, natural memory enables organisms to play a role in their development and to influence the course of evolution. Between the randomness of molecular events and the necessity of physical law lies a probabilistic gray area in which a creature may choose to follow its species memory or ” if environmental conditions have changed sufficiently ” to select a new course of action Elsasser’s organismic selection is thus the logical counterpart to Darwin’s natural selection.
Neo-Darwinism mistakes time for space, compressing history into a molecule that obeys dead laws of nature, that is, laws that account for nonlife but not necessarily life.
Isn’t it time for the Darwinian revolution to come full circle? Neither our own species nor any other is the passive product of external forces, be they intelligent or blind. To deny the first but not the second is to leave the revolution half undone. Darwin’s declaration of independence establishes freedom from any and all celestial proclamations, regardless of where they originate ” in a book or with a bang ” so long as they deny our birthright of active self-creation. As Sheldrake and Elsasser demonstrate, with a bit of imagination we can establish a basis for the inheritance of adaptations and thereby escape the sterile, endless clash of Tweedledum and Tweedledarwin. Not only can we conceive of biology without mechanism but we have no choice, as the ghost of mechanism past will surely haunt us until we’ve expelled it in all its forms.
http://30145.myauthorsite.com/
Edited by bertvan, : No reason given.
[uel]Qeustions about Materialism[/url]