character, all sorts. Why even these guys agree on that, at least in relation to more recent times, but there's an awful lot more to it, apparently, so that they are now talking about an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis:
'Suzan Mazur, Scoop, NZ, July 10 It's not Yasgur's Farm, but what happens at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria this July promises to be far more transforming for the world than Woodstock. What it amounts to is a gathering of 16 biologists and philosophers of rock star stature - let's call them "the Altenberg 16" - who recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence. It's pre the discovery of DNA, lacks a theory for body form and does not accommodate other new phenomena. So the theory Charles Darwin gave us, which was dusted off and repackaged 70 years ago, seems about to be reborn as the "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis".
Papers are in. MIT will publish the findings in 2009 - the 150th anniversary of Darwin's publication of the Origin of Species. And despite the fact that organizers are downplaying the Altenberg meeting as a discussion about whether there should be a new theory, it already appears a done deal. Some kind of shift away from the population genetic-centered view of evolution is afoot. . .'
And here is more interesting information you will not find to your taste:
'Suzan Mazur: Are there alternatives to natural selection?
Stuart Kauffman: I think self-organization is part of an alternative to natural selection. . . In fact, it's a huge debate. The truth is that we don't know how to think about it.
Suzan Mazur: You said in your forward to Investigations: "Self organization mingles with natural selection in barely understood ways to yield the magnificence of our teeming biosphere. We must, therefore, expand evolutionary theory."
Stuart Kauffman: I'm still there. . . .
Suzan Mazur: You've said: "The snowflake's delicate six-fold symmetry tells us that order can arise without the benefit of natural selection." So it can arise without natural selection, but it's not living.
Stuart Kauffman: But it's not living. Right. There are all sorts of signatures of self-organization. I'll give you one that very few would doubt. . . If you take lipids like cholesterol and you put them in water, they fall into a structure - a liposome, which is called a bilipid membrane, that forms a hollow vesicle. . . . Now if you look at the structure of this bilipid membrane, it's virtually identical to the bilipid membrane in your cells. So this is a self-organized property of lipids. That's physics and chemistry. . . . And evolution has made use of it to make lipid membranes that balance cells. So that's a snowflake. It's hard to look at that and doubt it. Nothing mysterious or mystical. . .
Suzan Mazur: No genes in the mix.
Stuart Kauffman: Genes by themselves are utterly dead. They're just DNA molecules. It takes a whole cell in the case of a fertilized egg to grow into an adult. So there's a lot of physics and chemistry. . . . And somehow the right answer is that this is a whole integrated system in which matter, energy, information, whatever that means - it turns out to be a very slippery concept - and the control of process is all organized in some way. . .
Suzan Mazur: So natural selection exists throughout the universe?
Stuart Kauffman: Well, yes, wherever there's life. But notice that there's self-organization too. . .
There are people who are spouting off as if we know the answer. We don't know the answer.
Suzan Mazur: So you're saying we should enjoy life.
Stuart Kauffman: Well, we should enjoy life. But we have to rethink evolutionary theory. It's not just natural selection. Self-organization is real.'
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0807/S00214.htmYet there is no rational alternative to Intelligent Design. Einstein, did't belieive in a personal God, yet was in absolute awe of what he called, '.... illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.' Vegetable life, bereft as it is of intelligence, can neither organise themselves or select a robust partner to help them perpetuate the species. The agency responsible must be transcend the empirical, be omniscient and omnipotent.
Ironically (and topically), it's the Hidden Hand that the moral philospher, Adam Smith, was alluding to. In reality, he was simply iterating and commending the age-old Christian axiom that grace builds upon nature. 'All things work together for good to those that love God.' Don't scorn the activities of the suicidally worldly, rapacious businessman, use his lowly skills. But be very, very sure that you monitor his every action, as if by electronic tagging, because otherwise, he will be your master. And a very, very cruel and vicious one at that. We are all of us body as well as spirit. They can help us feed our bodies; with God's grace we can help nurture their spiritual nature. In the end, God has no favourites.
That was evidently what Smith meant by his Hidden Hand. He was contending against the Norman (norseman) aristocracy and upper-class, whose treasure derived from the plundering of other nations and their own British subjects; and they would have been envious of the merchants' endless capacity for capacity for money-making. Smith was saying that hobbling them in the ways the latter favoured was short-sighted. Don't throw the baby out with the bath-water.
But to revert to the "self-organisation" to which Kauffman refers, that still remains on the self-limiting path imposed by empirical science. They will need to go back to the original meaning of the word, 'science' as simply 'knowledge', incorporating the empirical bit wherever appropriate. Of course, atheists will cite the so-called 'God the Gaps', but that is very facile, since an omniscient and omnipotent God would necessarily be spared the limitations that entail gaps.
That emotional fixation you have with atheism is an intellectual cul-de-sac, and a very poor religion. The following article becomes heavy going, after a while, unless you're into the detailed complexity of philosophy at that level. But the blurb at the end of the article indicates the withering acerbity of her put-down of secular fundamentalism.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3jUSU-r0lpMC&dq=Mary+Midgley&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=5kDzSpjCM82hjAetkuWkDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CBsQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=&f=falseEvidently, you would dismiss Galileo and Einstein as 'fundie' simpletons, because your penultimate sentence absolutely contradicts one of their most elementary axioms, best summarised by the latter: 'Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.' The first article in the link below should give you a glimpse of the terminal limitations of Newton's mechanistic physics - limitations, that is, in terms of the frontiers of our research of the macro and microcosm. Quantum physics is pure magic, if my layman's understanding of such phenomena as 'ghost-like action from a distance' is any guide.
Strange, though, isn't it, that so many scientific break-throughs were achieved by men with a religious background. There seems to be an affinity between Christianity and empirical science, albeit at the rather higher level of inductive reasoning. Darwin majored in theology.
From Wikipedia:
'Darwin had to stay at Cambridge until June. He studied Paley's Natural Theology which made an argument for divine design in nature, explaining adaptation as God acting through laws of nature.'
'When exams drew near, Darwin focused on his studies and was delighted by the language and logic of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity.<21> In his final examination in January 1831 Darwin did well, coming tenth out of a pass list of 178.'
And this, again from Wiki:
'Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20, 1822<1> – January 6, 1884) was an Augustinian priest and scientist, who gained posthumous fame as the figurehead of the new science of genetics for his study of the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of these traits follows particular laws, which were later named after him. The significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century. The independent rediscovery of these laws formed the foundation of the modern science of genetics.'
Then of course there were Galileo and Newton:
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was a pivotal figure in the development of modern astronomy, both because of his contributions directly to astronomy, and because of his work in physics and its relation to astronomy. He provided the crucial observations that proved the Copernican hypothesis, and also laid the foundations for a correct understanding of how objects moved on the surface of the earth (dynamics) and of gravity.
'Newton, who was born the same year that Galileo died, would build on Galileo's ideas to demonstrate that the laws of motion in the heavens and the laws of motion on the earth were one and the same. Thus, Galileo began and Newton completed a synthesis of astronomy and physics in which the former was recognized as but a particular example of the latter, and that would banish the notions of Aristotle almost completely from both.
One could, with considerable justification, view Galileo as the father both of modern astronomy and of modern physics.'
http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADFA_enGB339GB339&q=galileo+laws+dynamicsRather pathetically, because of Galileo's confrontation with the institutional church of his day, atheists like to claim him as their own, but that is far from the truth. The truth is that, like Newton, he was what many would have called a 'religious nut'. It was only the influence of his powerful father tha prevented his joining the priesthood. Newton ended scorning mathematics and physics, albeit in favour of alchemy and a theology that doesn't seem to have made an impression then or now. But you'd have to agree, he was some physicist, and pretty smart.
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