Posted on 09/26/2006 9:42:45 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION
Michael J. Behe (View Bio) The Free Press, 2007
Continuing the important and controversial work begun in his best-selling DARWIN'S BLACK BOX, this book explores the ragged border of the most influential idea of our time—Darwinian evolution. In a nutshell, undiluted Darwinism says that life developed strictly through the interplay of chance and natural selection. Random mutations thrown up by genetic mistakes spread if they helped a lucky mutant to leave more offspring than others of its species. Incessant repetition of this simple process over eons didn't just modify the fringes of life. It built the wonders of biology from the ground up, from the intricate molecular machinery of cells up to and including the human mind.
That's the official story, anyway, which is often presented as a package deal—take it or leave it. Yet Darwin's multifaceted theory has to be sifted carefully, because it actually contains a number of unrelated, entirely separate ideas. Scientific reasoning, like many other intellectual endeavors, is simply a chain of logic built on facts and assumptions. This book assumes any well-informed, reasoning person—PhD or no—can critique the logical chain, question the supposed facts, and challenge the assumptions.
To help us see what random mutation and natural selection can really do, this book takes an unusual approach. In order to get a realistic idea of the power of Darwinian evolution, it leaves behind most of the popular images—dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, pretty Galapagos finches—to focus mainly on the invisible foundation of biology, the molecular world of the cell. There are two vital reasons for this: First, mutations—the fuel of Darwinian evolution—are themselves molecular changes, where the DNA of an organism is accidentally altered from that of its parents. Second, the most intricate work of life takes place at the level of molecules and cells. Imperceptible molecules are the foundational level of life. So, to locate the edge of evolution, we have to examine life's foundation.
"In this new book Dr. Behe will expand on his prior comments that ID requires no facts to support it, yet evolutionary biology can't refer to any of the trillions of existing obervations supporting the evolution of species in any of its arguments.
Afterwards, there will be coffee cake and hot coffee downstairs."
I don't see any harm in leaving it in news, since that's where many of the evolution threads have gone.
Michael Behe is one of the two or three most important theorists in this area. Darwinists may disagree with him, but he uses rational, scientific arguments to make his case. So a new book is important news on an issue that has become politicized in our activist courts.
Reproduction didn't evolve...or at least it had to be built in from the beginning.
LOL!!
Madame Zaza would like you to cross her palm with silver. You are also 'invited' to buy some lucky heather.
What a pantload! You really should read his court testimony (Dover, Pa.) under cross examination regarding his defense of the concept: "Irreduceable Complexity."
Any suggestion that Behe uses rational, scientific arguments will be quickly dispelled after reading this.
Hey, I was a physics major half way through Harvard before I changed my mind, and I have a fair understanding both of the scientific method and the history of science.
For the most part, creationism was just a backdoor way of talking about religion as if it were science. But I don't really blame the creationists for doing it; it was a result of their frustration at a series of unconstitutional court decisions that violated the freedom of religion clause.
Intelligent design theory, on the other hand, includes a good deal of scientific argument. No doubt it also has hangers on who wouldn't know science from a hole in the ground, but you really can't blame that on writers like Behe.
Darwin is the one I have trouble with as a scientist. For one thing, his argument is circular. For another, he was a racist. It wasn't just T.H. Huxley and the cultural evolutionists who were responsible for the rise of racism and eugenics in the nineteenth century. It was also Darwin himself.
The full title of his original book, which contains quite a number of racist passages, was this: "On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection: Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."
I've read several of his essays on irreducible complexity, and find the argument persuasive. It's not definitive, but it is an overwhelming argument statistically, and that's all that's really possible.
Debunked. And debunked so often it has been given a number, CA005.2, in a long list titled Index to Creationist Claims.
Yes, of course, that's how Darwinists read it. But it hardly means they are correct.
Here's a quotation from "The Descent of Man," which I'm afraid is all I have at hand at the moment.
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."
--Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", 2nd edition, New York, A L. Burt Co., 1874, p. 178.
There are other quotations to illustrate his conviction that white Europeans are superior to all other peoples, and that evolution will lead to the extinction of the inferior races--African, Indian, Chinese, etc.
Yes, Darwin was a soft racist, as was nearly everyone else in England at the time. Yes, he did believe Caucasians were superior to other races to some extent, but his views were more enlightened than the average Englishman's. He opposed slavery, for example. Nor did he favor the extermination of any human races; in fact, he opposed it. The quotation from Descent of Man that you cite merely reflects what he thought was most likely to happen in the future, not what he wanted to happen (and thankfully, he was wrong, so far). Nevertheless, his racial views are irrelevent. The validity of his theory stands and falls on the merits of the theory, not the moral worth of Darwin himself.
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