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Darwin, Design, and the devil in the details

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Title: Darwin, Design, and the devil in the details


1
Darwin, Design, and the devil in the details
Evolution has such intimate significance for our
daily life that it creates immensely great
psychological resistances to seeing even the most
obvious truth. Garrett Hardin, 1959.
  • Joseph V. Siry
  • Environmental Studies
  • Rollins College
  • January, 2006

2
Darwins insight
  • Darwin, himself, wrote
  • When it was first said that the sun stood still
    and the world turned round, the common sense of
    mankind declared the doctrine false but the old
    saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every
    philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.
  • "As buds give rise by growth by growth to fresh
    buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and
    overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by
    generation I believe it has been with the great
    Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and
    broken branches the crust of the earth, and
    covers the surface with its ever branching and
    beautiful ramifications."
  • Chapters 4 and 6, The Origin of Species, (1859)

3
Revolutions in ideas
  • "Modern science is the product of two great
    revolutions in thought, one that we call the
    Newtonian revolution, the other the Darwinian. It
    is often implied that the principle distinction
    between these two is that one took place in
    physics
  • "The Darwinian revolution involved a far more
    profound reassessment of the sense of the world,
    resulting in a view that no merely verbal
    substitution could make consonant with the old.
  • G. Hardin, Nature Man's Fate, p. 259

4
The context of the Darwinian Revolution
  • The Naturalists
  • William Paley, Natural Theology
  • The Bridgewater Treatises
  • Modern Biology
  • Loren Eisley
  • Garrett Hardin
  • Ernst Mayr
  • Stephen J. Gould
  • Lynn Margulis
  • Edward O. Wilson
  • RNA, DNA and Proteins

5
Natural Theology
  • John Ray, 1680s
  • The Wisdom of God Manifest in Creation
  • Newtons faith in one God, reason, math
  • Gravity was a key to the Creators rationality
  • Mathematics was Gods language.
  • William Paley, 1802
  • Introduced the concept of good for the species
  • Undermined Aristotelian perspective
  • life was designed because it was so perfectly
    fitted to the conditions of existence

6
Early education
  • Alexander Von Humboldt traveled to South America
    popularized naturalist travel.
  • Darwin studied for the Ministry in 1827, He too
    was an orthodox Christian.
  • As I did not then in the least doubt the strict
    and literal truth of every word in in the Bible.
    (Charles Darwin, Autobiography, p.
    57.)
  • Discoveries raised objections in his mind to what
    clearly the Bible fails to address.
  • Ernst Mayr, One on Argument, 1992

7
Paley made naturalists
  • Paley made Naturalists, Darwin was one of them.
  • Darwin once remarked, I do not think I hardly
    ever admired a book more than Paleys Natural
    Theology. I could almost formerly have said it by
    heart.
  • Paley used the eye as an example of perfection.
    Then Darwin, in chapter six, used the eye as
    evidence for natural selections power to
    exquisitely shape organs. Yet Helmholtz, 50 years
    later, said the eye was a poor optical
    instrument!
  • Hardin, Nature and Mans Fate, pp, 58-59.,

8
The Voyage
9
Bridgewater Treatises
  • 8th Earl of Bridgewater was Francis Henry Egerton
  • His 1829 bequest of 8,000 was for a work or
    works that promoted the argument from design.
  • The bequest paid for works on the power, wisdom,
    and goodness of God as manifested in Creation.
  • From 1833-36 eight volumes promoted the idea of a
    divine designer.
  • Evidence of design in the world about us implies
    an intelligent designer.

10
Humans are not well designed
  • Too many teeth for the jaw or mandibular arch
  • Upright posture strained the back
  • Infants head and womans pelvic girth
  • Rapid enlargement of cerebral cortex, especially
    prefrontal and frontal lobes growth
  • Esophagus and windpipe converge exacerbating
    choking to death
  • Appendix and other vestigial organs
  • Genetic disorders tay sachs, huntingtons
    chorea, hemophilia

11
Darwins Origin of Species
  • When we reflect on these facts, here given much
    too briefly, with respect to the wide,
    diversified, and graduated range of structure in
    the eyes of the lower animals and when we bear
    in mind how small the number of all living forms
    must be in comparison with those which have
    become extinct, the difficulty ceases to be very
    great in believing that natural selection may
    have converted the simple apparatus of an optic
    nerve, coated with pigment and invested by
    transparent membrane, into an optical instrument
    as perfect as is possessed by any member of the
    articulate class.

12
The Eye
  • He who will go thus far, ought not to hesitate
    to go one step further, if he finds on finishing
    this volume that large bodies of facts, otherwise
    inexplicable, can be explained by the theory of
    modification through natural selection he ought
    to admit that a structure even as perfect as an
    eagle's eye might thus be formed, although in
    this case he does not know the transitional
    states.
  • Chapter Six, On the Origin of Species

13
Five Kingdoms of life
  • Monera
  • Protictista
  • Fungi
  • Plants
  • Animals

 "...such trees are idealized representations of
the past. In reality the tree of life often grows
in on itself." Lynn Margulis
14
What is Natural Selection?
  • Natural selection is the process by which the
    forms of organisms in a population that are best
    adapted to the environment increase in frequency
    relative to less well adapted forms over a number
    of generations.
  • this process can explain both evolution and
    adaptation.
  • Mark Ridley, Evolution, Third edition.
    http//www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Natu
    ral_selection.asp. 11/19/05 1245 PM

15
What Drives Evolution?
  • Darwin's theory requires
  • 1) variation in traits (eye color) to exist
    across any population
  • 2) the inheritability of traits from parents to
    offspring
  • 3) differential reproductive success among
    individual offspring
  • "The fundamental evolutionary event is a change
    in the frequency of genes and chromosome
    configurations in a population.
  • "Individuals and their immediate descendants do
    not evolve. Populations evolve, in the sense that
    the proportions of carriers of different genes
    change through time.
  • "All beings alive today are equally evolved."
  • Wilson, p. , Margulis, p. 20.

16
Natural Selection is too complicated
  • Not based on mutations.
  • Population thinking replaced typological thought
    of Aristotle.
  • Various traits mediated by RNA and protein
    synthesis generate potential for changes.
  • Adaptive changes persist.

perfect adaptation to the conditions of
existence Alfred Russel Wallace.
17
Intelligent design is not science
  • Examples of poor design are too numerous
  • RNA and Natural Selection are complicated enough
  • Genetic evidence in DNA sequencing for
  • Common ancestors and shared protein pathways,
  • Mitochondrial DNA is a maternal inheritance,
  • Eukaryotic organisms arose from ancestral
    Prokaryots.
  • There is no evidence to test in intelligent
    design
  • Experiments needed to negate the hypothesis.
  • Theoretical, gedanken or thought experiment is
    wanting.
  • Design belongs appropriately in a history or
    sociology of the life sciences class, not
    biology.

18
Conclusion
  • "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled
    bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds,
    with birds singing on the bushes, with various
    insects flitting about, and with worms crawling
    through the damp earth, and to reflect that these
    elaborately constructed forms, so different from
    each other, and dependent on each other in so
    complex a manner, have all been produced by laws
    acting around us.
  • There is a grandeur in this view of life, with
    its several powers, having been originally
    breathed into a few forms or into one and that,
    whilst this planet has gone cycling on according
    to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a
    beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
    wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
  • On the Origin of Species, 489-490.
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