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David Warren finds the tone of Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt “wearying”

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David Warren Warren is a Canadian Catholic columnist who has generally been sympathetic to design in the universe an life forms, but he says,

It is a controversial book, a fighting book. It was written, I should think, not for biologists or other scientists, but for the “intelligent general reader.” It is full of exactly sourced material – ammunition to hurl at the enemy trenches. An aficionado of the topic myself, I speed-read through its 500 pages, discovering little new, and nothing whatever surprising in the arguments. Instead I found myself checking the items off, like a regimental quartermaster.

The tone I found wearying. Partly this is the consequence of stalemate. I already knew how the neo-Darwinists would answer each point, given their control of Wikipedia and so forth; and how to expose their answers as tosh. So of course does Dr. Meyer, who by now has been trudging through the mud of this “Western Front” for years. One admires how he keeps up his spirits. One admires even more how they keep up their spirits on the other side.

Well, on that last point, Darwinians have tenure, the right to persecute and the certainty that even their nonsense and blunders will be regarded as wit and brilliance by those for whom Darwinian evolution is the world’s creation story.

Dr. Meyer’s previous book, reflexively trashed by the neo-Darwinian establishment, showed the impossibility of unicellular life appearing in the first place. It was attacked with reductionist, straw-man arguments, which omitted his main point: that we cannot get something from nothing. From Darwin forward, it has been necessary to accept some initial life form or forms as a “given.” The hypothesis then builds on natural selection from gradually accumulating small “random” mutations.

This new book shows the impossibility of that “Cambrian explosion” – in which an astounding variety of incredibly sophisticated “body plans,” including apparent precursors of all we know today, emerged during a singularly quick snip of geological time, all over the planet, starting around 525 million years ago. More.

Warren thinks argument is a waste of time at this point:

And it is pointless to fight the neo-Darwinian establishment. As men like Simon Conway Morris have shown (see his remarkable “Map of Life” website), the best Christian tactic is to ignore the secular-humanist enemy, with its atheist political agenda, and simply publish the discoveries. They speak for themselves. At heart, the enemy knows he is defeated, and it is time to move on.

Here I must take issue. Darwinian evolution is the sort of truth that ends other truths, including any need to account for masses of facts that do not support it. Including any need to be fair or reasonable.

It explains the world in a way increasing numbers of people want and need it explained. (About silly little things, you blow up instead of growing up? Hey, early man did that.) Therefore, if attention is drawn to such discoveries as Warren notes, they are undermined or attacked. If a defense is offered, the discoverers will be undermined and attacked too, with smug approval all around. Such opponents as the Darwinians (they are not rare in history) are not defeated simply by a display of facts and evidence. They’re just so far past that now. – O’Leary for News

Comments
A lot of what David Warren says is correct. Most of what Meyers says is available in his other books. But one very dramatic change is discussed in Meyer's book, namely that body plans are not in the genome. They are elsewhere and we know almost nothing about these blueprints for an organism. They are contained elsewhere in the egg besides the genome. So major changes to an organism must take place in these blueprints wherever they are and we know almost nothing about how the information is stored. It sounds like the genome may be child's plan compared to this system.jerry
September 8, 2013
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perhaps he will find this 'tone' more to his liking: Darwin’s Doubt: Spoken Word – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywPJmFqrqhMbornagain77
September 7, 2013
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