2017-10-15, 07:04 AM
(2017-10-15, 12:00 AM)Steve001 Wrote: [ -> ]What alternative(s) can you provide to the standard of evolutionary theory?
I see it this way. It's necessarily lengthy. Intelligent design primarily makes the case that intelligence must be a major causative agent in macroevolution, that reductive materialism especially in the form of neo-Darwinism can't suffice to explain it. In doing this, it doesn't have to and doesn't try to come up with another mechanism with a specification or description of what the intelligent agent(s) are or were. It is sufficient to demonstrate that intelligent agents are the only known, observed, source of the sort of organized complexity in the form of intricate machines that macroevolution seems to have produced in greatly magnified biological ways especially as irreducibly complex machines. This of course also applies even more strongly to the origin of life problem.
It may (or may not) be possible to determine the exact mechanism the designer used to do the designing, and the nature of the designer. But we don't have to be able to answer these questions to know that the object in question was indeed designed.
From https://evolutionnews.org/2015/11/whats_the_mecha/:
Quote:"The insistence on providing a mechanism is following a particular view of science known as methodological naturalism, or methodological materialism. This view of science claims that science must limit itself to strictly materialistic causes to explain all phenomena in nature, even things like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and causes of human consciousness."
"We cannot directly observe the cause of the origin of life or repeat the events we study in the history of life, but we can infer what cause is most likely to be responsible, as Stephen Meyer likes to say, “from our repeated and uniform experience.” In our experience the only thing capable of causing the origin of digital code or functional information or causal circularity is intelligence and we know that the origin of life and the origin of animal life, for example, required the production of just such things in living systems....The theory of intelligent design does not propose a mechanism (a strictly or necessarily materialistic cause (required by methodological materialism)) for the origin of biological information. Rather, it proposes an intelligent or mental cause. In so doing, it does exactly what we want a good historical scientific theory to do. It proposes a cause that is known from our uniform and repeated experience (to borrow a phrase) to have the power to produce the effect in question, which in this case, is functional information in living systems."
Some biologists and evolutionists recognize the problems with modern neo-Darwinism and think they have found a way to extend the theory to solve them. They think that the many additional mechanisms beyond random mutations creating genetic variation that have been discovered can save the theory. For instance there is a group called the "Third Way":
Quote:"Neo-Darwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. The DNA record does not support the assertion that small random mutations are the main source of new and useful variations. We now know that the many different processes of variation involve well regulated cell action on DNA molecules.....Genomes merge, shrink and grow, acquire new DNA components, and modify their structures by well-documented cellular and biochemical processes."
I don't think efforts like this can work to save neo-Darwinism, because they merely expand the number of ways, the number of reductive materialist mechanisms, that generate genetic variation that is mainly still random with respect to fitness. Epigenetics is one exception, but it operates primarily at the level of whole genes or at least of long strings of DNA. It doesn't seem to be able to create much, or explain how it evolves in the first place.
Other suggestions that the intracellular machinery somehow incorporates mechanisms that "purposefully" modify parts of the genome especially developmental pathways in just the right ways needed in response to particular stresses, etc. just push the problem down the road a little. Then it has to be explained how such what must be very intricate mechanisms originally came about, and so on. More importantly, they assume what is in question, that mechanical mechanisms however complicated can themselves create complicated integrated mechanisms, especially irreducibly complex ones.