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To: js1138
But you never seem to bring to the surface the fact that Shapiro is a mainstream biologist who has nothing in common with Young Earth Creationism, with Dembski’s Front Loading, or with any interpretation of biological evidence that requires supernatural intervention.

Why should I state what one can discover by reading what I link. So he didn't like Behe's book in 1996. Well, this is what he had to say about Darwinists in 1997. A Third Way

Although such purists as Dennett and Dawkins repeatedly assert that the scientific issues surrounding evolution are basically solved by conventional neo-Darwinism, the ongoing public fascination reveals a deeper wisdom. There are far more unresolved questions than answers about evolutionary processes, and contemporary science continues to provide us with new conceptual possibilities.

Unfortunately, readers of Boston Review may remain unaware of this intellectual ferment because the debate about evolution continues to assume the quality of an abstract and philosophical "dialogue of the deaf" between Creationists and Darwinists. Although our knowledge of the molecular details of biological organization is undergoing a revolutionary expansion, open-minded discussions of the impact of these discoveries are all too rare. The possibility of a non-Darwinian, scientific theory of evolution is virtually never considered. In my comments, then, I propose to sketch some developments in contemporary life science that suggest shortcomings in orthodox evolutionary theory and open the door to very different ways of formulating questions about the evolutionary process. After a discussion of technical advances in our views about genome organization and the mechanisms of genetic change, I will focus on a growing convergence between biology and information science which offers the potential for scientific investigation of possible intelligent cellular action in evolution.

What significance does an emerging interface between biology and information science hold for thinking about evolution? It opens up the possibility of addressing scientifically rather than ideologically the central issue so hotly contested by fundamentalists on both sides of the Creationist-Darwinist debate: Is there any guiding intelligence at work in the origin of species displaying exquisite adaptations that range from lambda prophage repression and the Krebs cycle through the mitotic apparatus and the eye to the immune system, mimicry, and social organization? Borrowing concepts from information science, new schools of evolutionists can begin to rephrase virtually intractable global questions in terms amenable to computer modelling and experimentation. We can speculate what some of these more manageable questions might be: How can molecular control circuits be combined to direct the expression of novel traits? Do genomes display characteristic system architectures that allow us to predict phenotypic consequences when we rearrange DNA sequence components? Do signal transduction networks contribute functional information as they regulate the action of natural genetic engineering hardware?

Questions like those above will certainly prove to be naive because we are just on the threshold of a new way of thinking about living organisms and their variations. Nonetheless, these questions serve to illustrate the potential for addressing the deep issues of evolution from a radically different scientific perspective. Novel ways of looking at longstanding problems have historically been the chief motors of scientific progress. However, the potential for new science is hard to find in the Creationist-Darwinist debate. Both sides appear to have a common interest in presenting a static view of the scientific enterprise. This is to be expected from the Creationists, who naturally refuse to recognize science's remarkable record of making more and more seemingly miraculous aspects of our world comprehensible to our understanding and accessible to our technology. But the neo-Darwinian advocates claim to be scientists, and we can legitimately expect of them a more open spirit of inquiry. Instead, they assume a defensive posture of outraged orthodoxy and assert an unassailable claim to truth, which only serves to validate the Creationists' criticism that Darwinism has become more of a faith than a science.

You'll notice the criticism of Darwinists and the mention of addressing Intelligent Design scientifically.

P.S. Your citation in post 797 is from an Intelligent Design site.

807 posted on 04/07/2008 2:49:39 PM PDT by AndrewC
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To: AndrewC

I do know where my citations come from, and I do read them through to make sure I am not quote mining.

Again, I find that over the years you never criticise young earth creationism or any of the weird forms of ID.

So when you use the term nonrandom or guiding intelligence, some may mistake your reference as a reference to a supernatural designer, rather than an intelligence that is more like a computer algorithm, an analogy which Shapiro explicitly uses.


808 posted on 04/07/2008 2:56:25 PM PDT by js1138
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