Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin Of Animal Life And The Case For Intelligent Design (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
This 400 page masterpiece is the book I always wanted to author myself! Stephen Meyer really did his homework, he did'nt miss any relevant research or update to the scientific status of Evolutionary Biology, neither did he oversee any possible objection to his critics or arguments! He is a marvelous writer indeed and his book deserves more than five stars, but not because he proved his point so persuasively ( although he did) but rather because of the objective and open-minded way he presented the evolutionary controversey. For me, this quote out of the page 228 - 229 summarizes the poor scientific reason of the neo - Darwinian claims about the mechanisms that produce the raw material of Evolution, genetic variation through random mutation that is. And I claim that this is the central dilemma because without any means of variation established, you wont have any credibility to claim to have demonstrated the whole picture of Darwinian Evolution. And here is the quote :" In the absence of such demonstrations, evolutionary biologists have taken to offering what one biologist I know calls "word salad" -jargon- laced descriptions of unobserved past events - some possible perhaps but none with the demonstrated capacity to generate the information necessary to produce novel forms of life. This genre of evolutinary literature envisions exons being "recruited"and / or "donated" from other genes or from an "unknown source"; it appeals to extensive refashioning" of genes; it attributes "fortuitous juxtaposition of suitable sequences" to mutations or "fortuitous acquisition" of promoter elements, it assumes that "radical change in structure " of a gene is due to "rapid adaptive evolution"; it asserts that "positive selection played an important role in the evolution of genes", even in cases when the function of the gene under study is completely unknown, it imagines genes being "cobbled together from DNA of no related function or no function at all; it asumes the creation of new exons "from a unique noncoding genomic sequence that fortuitously evolved"; it invokes "the chimeric fusion of two genes", it explains "near identical" proteins in disparate lineages as "a striking case of convergent evolution", and when no source material for the evolution of a new gene can be identified it asserts that " genes emerge and evolve very rapidly, generating copies that bear little similarity to their ancestral precursors" because thay are apparently "hypermutable". Finally , when all else fails, scenarios invoke " de novo origination " of new genes, as if that phrase - anymore than the others just mentioned - constitutes a scientific demonstration of the power of mutational mechanisms to produce significant amounts of new genetic information. these vague narratives resemble nothing so much as the naming games of scholastic philosophers in the middle ages. Why does opiun put people to sleep? Because it has a dormative virtue. What causes new genes to evolve so rapidly? Their "hypermutability" or perhaps their ability to undergo "rapid, adaptive evolution". How do we explain the origin of two similar genes in seperate and disparate lineages? Convergent evolution of course. What is convergent evolution? The presence of two similar genes in two seperate but otherwise widely disparate lineages. "I think the point has been made! haha! I love you Meyer! a good read, though a little uneven . . it *exhaustively* dealt with very specific issues re: the cambrian explosion, etc. but then came up to the suggestion of intelligent design quickly and with not much else to say . . i did like how documented it all was and that even the suggestion of ID read not like a "God of the gaps" thing, but like a legit scientific hypothesis, with criteria for testability, etc. . . not sure where this sits in the spectrum of the "debate" and i'm sure that there are neo-darwinian answers to everything meyer brings up, but he's spot on when it comes to some of the basic criticisms surrounding design being counted out as inadmissible in principle . . have never understood the adherence to blind scientism that won't allow even the possibility of God as a "hypothesis" in arenas like this . .
What do You think about Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin Of Animal Life And The Case For Intelligent Design (2013)?
Excellent. Explains the real issues with Darwinism and neo Darwinism. Well worth reading.
—michieoo89
Just my opinion but I think he makes a pretty good argument for intelligent design.
—malinimoodley
Very thorough discussion of the shortcomings of Darwins theory of evolution.
—Liz
What is this doing in the Science section? Please refile under Religion.
—dick0950
