Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Materialist atheist profs who doubt Darwin offer their own view of evolution

Denyse O'Leary
April 17, 2011
Atheism, Darwinism, Evolution
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What Darwin Got Wrong“OK; so if Darwin got it wrong, what do you guys think is the mechanism of evolution?” Short answer: we don’t know what the mechanism of evolution is. As far as we can make out, nobody knows exactly how phenotypes evolve. We think that, quite possibly, they evolve in lots of different ways; perhaps there are as many distinct kinds of causal routes to the fixation of phenotypes as there are different kinds of natural histories of the creatures whose phenotypes they are …

– Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 153

This does not sound like the beginnings of another modernist cult or religion.

Comments
I did think it was bold of Fodor and P-P to flat out say that they had no 'theory of evolution' and didn't think it was clear there really was such a thing, at least in a comprehensive sense. They make it clear they believe everything evolved and common descent is true, but draw a distinction between the question of evolution and that of the mechanisms. Though what I still find amusing is that one of their central criticisms of natural selection is that the only way it could be valid is if 'nature' (or something using nature, I imagine) had a mind.nullasalus
April 17, 2011
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The bottom line is that we do not know the mechanism through which design was implemented, but we do know that design exists. This should be trivially obvious to anyone whose mind has not been clouded by the thoroughly irrational fantasy that that real design does not exist in living systems and cosmology.GilDodgen
April 17, 2011
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