FULL ARTICLE:
Scientists Confirm: Darwinism Is Broken
Full conference recordings:
New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives
Interesting quotes from the article:
"The
three-day conference at the
Royal Society in London was remarkable in confirming something that advocates of
intelligent design (ID), a controversial scientific alternative to evolution, have said for years. ID proponents point to a chasm that divides how evolution and its evidence are presented to the public, and how scientists themselves discuss it behind closed doors and in technical publications. This chasm has been well hidden from laypeople, yet it was clear to anyone who attended the Royal Society conference, as did a number of ID-friendly scientists."
"The opening presentation at the Royal Society by one of those world-class biologists, Austrian evolutionary theorist
Gerd Müller, underscored exactly Meyer’s contention. Dr. Müller opened the meeting by discussing several of the fundamental "explanatory deficits" of “the modern synthesis,” that is, textbook neo-Darwinian theory. According to Müller, the as yet unsolved problems include those of explaining:
- Phenotypic complexity (the origin of eyes, ears, body plans, i.e., the anatomical and structural features of living creatures);
- Phenotypic novelty, i.e., the origin of new forms throughout the history of life (for example, the mammalian radiation some 66 million years ago, in which the major orders of mammals, such as cetaceans, bats, carnivores, enter the fossil record, or even more dramatically, the Cambrian explosion, with most animal body plans appearing more or less without antecedents); and finally
- Non-gradual forms or modes of transition, where you see abrupt discontinuities in the fossil record between different types."
"In “Darwin’s Doubt,” for example, Meyer emphasized the obvious importance of genetic and other (i.e., epigenetic) types of information to
building novel phenotypic traits and forms of life. The new mechanisms offered by the critics of neo-Darwinism at the conference – whether treated as part of an extended neo-Darwinian synthesis or as the basis of a fundamentally new theory of evolution – did not attempt to explain how the information necessary to generating genuine novelty might have arisen. Instead, the mechanisms that were discussed produce at best minor microevolutionary changes, such as changes in wing coloration of butterflies or the celebrated polymorphisms of stickleback fish."
"James Shapiro’s talk, clearly one of the most interesting of the conference, highlighted this difficulty in its most fundamental form. Shapiro presented fascinating evidence showing,
contra neo-Darwinism, the
non-random nature of many mutational processes – processes that allow organisms to respond to various environmental challenges or stresses. The evidence he presented suggests that many organisms possess a kind of pre-programmed adaptive capacity – a capacity that Shapiro has elsewhere described as operating under “algorithmic control.” Yet, neither Shapiro, nor anyone else at the conference, attempted to explain how the information inherent in such algorithmic control or pre-programmed capacity might have originated."
