More meetings planned. Snatches from science writer Carl Zimmer at Quanta:
While Noble was struggling to respond, Shuker went back to the paper on an iPad. And now he read the abstract in a booming voice.
‘Our results demonstrate that natural selection can rapidly rewire regulatory networks,’” Shuker said. He put down the iPad. “So it’s a perfect, beautiful example of rapid neo-Darwinian evolution,” he declared.
Shuker distilled the feelings of a lot of skeptics I talked to at the conference. The high-flying rhetoric about a paradigm shift was, for the most part, unwarranted, they said. Nor were these skeptics limited to the peanut gallery. Several of them gave talks of their own. More.
Goodness, the relief that must have been felt when Darwinians (“skeptics,” if you please) asserted their creed again. Whatever happened, “natural selection” (whatever that is) did it.
There will ,in fact, be more meetings:
“This is likely the first of many, many meetings,” Laland told me. In September, a consortium of scientists in Europe and the United States received $11 million in funding (including $8 million from the John Templeton Foundation) to run 22 studies on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.
How much will Templeton, calling the shots, influence what is discussed and by whom? Templeton funds BioLogos, an elaborate attempt to make Christianity safe for Darwinism, or so it seems. Perhaps it will make science safe for Darwinism too.
Darwinism is now somewhat like multi-party political scandals: The failures are well-documented but the creed is beyond evaluation by evidence-based reasoning or remedy via reform. Eventually, something happens.
See also: Suzan Mazur: Amazing that the Royal Society meeting happened at all. The main goal of Darwin’s cronies will be to see that nothing like what it might have been ever happens.
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