Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Darwinists use scientifically indefensible language to imply progress in evolution?

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

This time, we weren’t the ones who said it.

At Access Research Network, David Tyler points out that Darwinists generally cannot rid themselves of the idea that Darwinism means “progress,” even though they insist up and down that it doesn’t.

Ever since Darwin, there has been a tension between the theory of biological transformation (stochastic tinkering) and the concept of progress. Two Italian biologists have scanned 67,413 scientific articles published between 2005 and 2010 in 16 top science journals. They were looking for examples of progressionist, pre-evolutionary language because they suspected that evolutionary biology has retained some cultural baggage implying a direction to evolutionary transformation. According to their thinking, the Great Chain of Being concept, historically known as the scala naturae, has a persistent unacknowledged influence over the minds of many in the research community. This concept assigns a place to every entity in the natural world, whether animate or inanimate, “from the lowest steps of the ladder occupied by fire, air and water, up to the highest steps hosting monkeys, apes and humans”.

“Despite the explosion of tree-like diagrams in the recent biological literature, evolution is indeed often perceived as a linear, progressive process rather than as a story of unceasing branching and diversification ultimately resulting in a tree. This misleading progressionism is scientifically undefensible (e.g., Dawkins 1992; O’Hara 1992, 1997; Gould 1994, 1996; Nee 2005; Gregory 2008; Omland et al. 2008; Casane and Laurenti 2013).”

Well, if Darwinists think it is scientifically indefensible, why do they keep doing it? Thoughts?

Comments

Leave a Reply