Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Punking Darwin

In response to Keith Warren on the CHAOPSYC list server, I wanted to take a beat here to address his question to me and clarify some aspects of intelligent design that get lost in the theater of Darwinism vs. Creationism.

Keith says: The goal in science is to demonstrate a natural mechanism that will explain a given phenomenon. Positing a supernatural mechanism is just a punt. So, again, what's your theory? Why is it better than Darwinian selection? Where is the evidence, preferably peer-reviewed? Build a better theory and the world will beat a path to your door. But ID doesn't have a theory at all.
Walter ReMine's book - The Biotic Message develops the design side of it on several levels, one of which is the presupposition of science needing to find natural mechanisms for phenomenon. I'm not sure what spooks people from ID more - the subject aspect of the effects of intelligence on life processes or the implications of the concept of design. Anyway, you wanted my big theory, so I'll boil it down to the only life that contains both sides of the argument - my own. My peer-reviewed papers, albeit not by NDPLS :(, are posted here and here. You'll find plenty of familiar friends in the references so I'm sure those 6 year old papers will be enough.
Science -- and I'm being conventional here - places the notion of falsifiability in the face of all 'pretenders' to the throne. The problem -- and I'm being unconventional here - is that Occam's Razor cuts both directions...
Darwin, who's work goes far beyond natural selection btw, did for biology what the periodic table of elements did for chemistry. In a nutshell, it gave us a map. What Gavin (I hope that's you?) was trying to get across in his posts was the notion that there's a presupposition Darwin has the best map around re: evolution. The LOL part for me is that hard core science types shudder when Darwin's model is framed a just another theory. The open-ended nature of scientific inquiry is predicated on the willingness of the scientist to dismiss their old take on things when a more lucid, 'observable' (OK, physicists get around this one), and most of all useful fiction comes along to improve the narrative modern science began 500 years ago. Science - and I'm being conventional again - collectively bristles when they get lumped in with other disciplines that are more at home with their storytelling, time-binding nature. It's only now, in the post-metaphysical Integral Age, that we have the resources to 'unpack' the jewel from the molasses and get into that dirty topic of subjectivity.
Once science gets fluent in discussing the dynamics of imagination and presupposition from a 1st person perspective, both individually and culturally, it will be able to put their more 3rd person-based skills of observation and expectation into their appropriate framework. Until then, Darwin gets to mind his map...
And we get to punk his dead ass, MRF 06.23

1 Comments:

Blogger Robert Affolter said...

You finally wandered over into my interests: ID.

I find another mind blower is that the critics of ID often are proponents of placebo controlled research. Without being part of an Intelligent Creator, there can be no placebo.

I think it is a hoot that pro-medicine/anti-ID people complain that chiropractors don't use placebo controlled research and at the same time scoff at our philosophy, when chiropractic philosophy offers an explanation for the placebo effect which anti-ID people cannot provide.

12:46 PM  

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