Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

That it is just Nominalism being the difference between the modern theory of evolution and NeoDarwinism (based on the Weismann Barrier) is like believing that Dixie is coming back!

Yes, that is the straw man which is presented by the pro-design contingent. In actuality, both have evolved in concert.
Linda

Yes, that is the straw man which is presented by the pro-design contingent. In actuality, both have evolved in concert.
Linda

In what way have they moved forward in "concert"?

Physiology has shown the molecular pathways for these signals carrying instincts and have documented their effects on future generations.  These signals prove explicitly the falsity of the Weismann barrier supporting the foundational law of NeoDarwinism - genes only change by random action during recombination - and not from about the information they processed during life (Lamarckianism).

Why is current paradigm so steeped in denying the obvious, that if acquiring information is as important for a species, as is food and sex, why wouldn't the evolution of mind be front and center!

 George John Romanes (1848–94) was considered by The Times to be 'the biological investigator upon whom in England the mantle of Mr. Darwin has most conspicuously descended'. Incorporating some of Darwin's unpublished notes, this book explores the question of whether human intelligence evolved. In a stance still often considered controversial at the time of its first printing in 1888, the first half establishes a link between humans and animals, and introduces some of the most important issues of nineteenth-century evolutionary psychology: the impact of relative brain sizes of humans and primates, the origin of self-consciousness and the possible reasons behind the apparent mental stasis of what Romanes terms 'savage man'. Following the argument that one of the main factors to be considered is language, the second half focuses on philology. Romanes' earlier work, Mental Evolution in Animals (1883), is also reissued in this series. -

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/su...1108037976

In what way have they moved forward in "concert"?

Regardless of which name they prefer, biologists and others working on evolutionary theory are referring to the same state-of-the-art with respect to ideas, research, mechanisms, etc. That is, there isn't a group of biologists stuck investigating only ideas at play in the 19th century or only in the first half of the 20th century, and a separate group dealing with the state-of-the-art, regardless of when any of the variety of names evolutionary theory goes by was invented.

Linda

Why the "new wave" of evolutionary biology, in trying to find some other blind, purposeless mechanism for evolution to replace Darwinism, abjectly fails:

Article  -  A game of thrones as Darwinism dissolves and top evolutionists scramble for a successor

"The various new proposals include punctuated equilibrium, neutral evolution, evolutionary developmental biology, self-organization, epigenetic inheritance, and natural genetic engineering. Big claims are made for each of these variants and other versions of blind evolution. But in the end those claims — while undoubtedly believed sincerely by their proponents — have little more substance than a bluff. Each has serious shortcomings as a substitute for foresight and planning with a purpose."

Punctuated equilibrium, for example:

"(This) attempts to explain why we see few transitional fossils in the fossil record from one animal form to a fundamentally different animal form. But the theory offers no credible mechanism for the geologically rapid appearances that it posits. Indeed, whatever challenges traditional neo-Darwinism faces in this regard, punctuated equilibrium faces them in an intensified way, since it has less time to build new forms."

Neutral evolution:

Steven Meyer: "(Michael) Lynch (in his neutral evolution research) vastly underestimates the waiting times required to generate complex adaptations and, therefore, fails to solve the problem of the origin of genes and proteins or any other complex adaptation."
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The other alternative evolutionary proposals face similarly devastating shortcomings. What they all lack is the secret sauce in every great engineering success — foresight, ingenuity and planning with a purpose in mind."

Scientists uncover a trove of genes that could hold key to how humans evolved
Researchers at the Donnelly Centre in Toronto have found that dozens of genes, previously thought to have similar roles across different organisms, are in fact unique to humans and could help explain how our species came to exist. These genes code for a class of proteins known as transcription factors, or TFs, which control gene activity. TFs recognize specific snippets of the DNA code called motifs, and use them as landing sites to bind the DNA and turn genes on or off.https://m.phys.org/news/2019-05-scientis...s-key.html

TFs recognize specific snippets of the DNA code called motifs, and use them as landing sites to bind the DNA and turn genes on or off.https://m.phys.org/news/2019-05-scientis...s-key.html

Transcription factors are proteins with specific chemistry and physical structure.  When the author of the article says that that proteins "recognize" code, please understand that it is metaphorical expression.  Maybe there are allosteric aspects to the physical structure, enabling lock&key molecular attachment.  BUT

The patterns of coded instructions have not evolved around a magical robotic chemical reaction.  The coded instructions have evolved in accordance with information science, where coherent and telenomic mental aspects of life are functional in survival.  There are no natural coded instructions measured in chemicals.

 

I absolutely admire Dr. James Tour! What I find hilarious about this video and others pertaining to him is that the arguments in the comments try their best to refute him, but they can not do it. They instead argue that he is a second-rate scientist who doesn’t know chemistry, despite the fact the he is one of the most referenced scientists in the world pertaining to his field. He is not second-rate, he knows his stuff.

Interesting point from Why I am not a Physicalist: Four Reasons for Rejecting the Faith

The Evolutionary Argument against Physicalism

The physicalism of today accepts four fundamental interactions: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. It does not accept mental force. The ultimate, counter-intuitive and thus mostly unwanted implication of this is epiphenomenalism: that mentality is completely useless, like the steam from a locomotive engine.[9] As well as the British idealist F. H. Bradley,[10] the influential philosopher of science Karl Popper[11] argues that such a belief is anti-evolutionary because were mentality impotent it would not have evolved. To suggest that one’s beliefs, desires, ambitions, calculations, perceptions, investigations, subconscious drives, emotions, plans, rationalizations, have absolutely no effect upon one’s body and thus upon the world is not only anathema to common sense, to the science of psychology, and to the power of reason, but is also a mockery of evolutionary theory (not to mention the Eleatic Principle).[12]

Not only does mentality exist in humans, but also presumably in the myriad other species of this world. For mentality to evolve and to maintain itself therein, without any purpose or power, runs against our notions of evolution, of selection. For instance, have we not evolved our intelligence, our reasoning powers? Did they not aid our survival and development? Very few will deny this premise, but a physicalist will deny mental force, mental causation: the power of the mind, as it is not a known fundamental force. Thus physicalism conflicts with evolutionary theory. To try to overcome this by identifying the mind with the physical will not work because: (1) psychoneural identity theory has failed, and (2) if mental powers are actually physical powers, one thereby returns to the predicament of having to explain why mentality exists if it has no powers of its own. The final outcome is that if one accepts evolution one must deny physicalism.

Interesting point from Why I am not a Physicalist: Four Reasons for Rejecting the Faith

Perhaps it is more appropriate for the Philosophy forum, but I think it is interesting to glance at all four of the "four reasons for rejecting the (physicalist) faith":

1. - Hempel’s Dilemma

...(For) physicalism, a reason for rejecting the position is the fact that it cannot be properly defined. ....The dilemma: it seems that the meaning of physicalism can be grasped through either of two horns:

The first horn is exclusive belief in the phenomena of current physics, such as matter-energy, space-time, the fundamental interactions, and so on. The problem with this is that such a belief is highly unlikely to be true. This is in part because we can witness the constant change of physics through history...Secondly, as is well known, the current state of physics cannot be final due, in particular, to the inconsistency between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Thirdly, as will be seen below, the role of the mind in current physics is undetermined.

The second horn of the dilemma: belief in the phenomena of a future, ideal physics. There are two chief problems with this alternative. Firstly, how could one believe in physicalism if one did not know what that was?...Secondly, it may turn out that a future physics would include mentality amongst its fundamental elements. This contradicts the materialist premise.


2. - Irreducible Mentality

Current physical properties cannot describe nor explain mentality, therefore reality must be more than that which such physicalism presents. I cannot describe mental states such as hunger, despair, pain, or curiosity using physical properties alone—it would be an unintelligible category mistake to describe my hunger as comprised of a certain mass, gravity, volume, charge, and shape.


3. - The Evolutionary Argument against Physicalism

The physicalism of today accepts four fundamental interactions: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. It does not accept mental force. The ultimate, counter-intuitive and thus mostly unwanted implication of this is epiphenomenalism: that mentality is completely useless, like the steam from a locomotive engine.
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(However,) not only does mentality exist in humans, but also presumably in the myriad other species of this world. For mentality to evolve and to maintain itself therein, without any purpose or power, runs against our notions of evolution, of selection. For instance, have we not evolved our intelligence, our reasoning powers? Did they not aid our survival and development?


4. - The Universal Cracking of Causal Closure

If one accepts....that there exists what the logician Frege called “the third realm” (beyond physicality and mentality) of objective truths—such as the truth of modus ponens, the properties of Pi, the Pythagorean theorem, or the Form of Beauty—truths that exist whether or not they are discovered, meaning that they are in essence neither mental nor physical (as there can be no neural correlates of non-existent mental events), then it implies that their existence has an effect upon the physical through their discovery.
.....Thus the existence of such universal truths implies the falsity of one of physicalism’s key tenets: the causal closure of the physical.

I'm sure there are philosophical rejoinders to all of them. I am personally more impressed by the great accumulation of empirical evidence.