5. The incommensurability between biology and physics assumed by Darwinian theory provides no basis within the theory according to which epistemic or meaningful relations between living things and their environments can take place.
Well, this is the main sticking point for yours truly. If evolution is truly "natural" then there has to be some sort of very real and obvious connection to physics and natural laws.
I also like the fact that Swenson realizes that organisms can not be so easily seperated from their ennvironments, and yet evolutionary theory seems to completely ignore this basic fact. One could argue that the connection falls under the umbrella of "natural selection, " but then selection is a destructive force only, and does not explain the symboitic relationship between organisms and their environments.
Really, evolution doesn't even explain why there even has to be evolution. jennyp speaks of the biological niches that need to be filled, but if your an organism surviving quite nicely in your little niche, there is no way it can know or discover a new niche that it now needs to evolve to occupy. In evolutionary theory, the only way it can happen is for an organism to accidently breed offspring that just happen to fill the new niche. Such a thing is within the realm of probabilty, and I think such things have been observed with very simple single-celled organisms, but then their simplicity is their virtue. It's quite another thing for a mouse to adopt to flying in order to catch tasty little insects.
All of Swenson's points are excellent and unassailable. I've seen some posters going after the low-hanging fruit of entropy, but really it's not a big deal in his argument, and could even be left out.
But the best little soundbite from this article is the one you quoted:
The autocatakinesis of living things, in contrast, is maintained with respect to non-local potentials discontinuously located in space-time to which they are not permanently connected.”
Just a fancy way of saying that outside forces have been at work in our biological world, beyond those of observable phenomena. And yet the effect of these unobservable forces can be observed, much like we can see a tree moving in the wind, but cannot see the wind itself.
The door for Intelligent Design is not only open, but is necessary to explain what we're observing!
Great article betty!
you: Just a fancy way of saying that outside forces have been at work in our biological world, beyond those of observable phenomena. And yet the effect of these unobservable forces can be observed, much like we can see a tree moving in the wind, but cannot see the wind itself.
"In evolutionary theory, the only way it can happen is for an organism to accidently breed offspring that just happen to fill the new niche."
In my view, evolution is a feedBACK system, you make a change and then find out whether it works. But humans now are capable of feedFORWARD, we know if we don't stop North Korea now, in the future there may only be Koreans. It is possible other feedforward processes have existed. So, I think this thread puts to rest the absolutist creationist view, but opens up many cans of worms as far as alternative evolutionary scenarios, which may or may not fall under Intelligent Design.