I also have an issue with his section on inverse causality. He mistakes the result for the cause. "Stegosaur plates begin forming in the embryo but only have a function in the adult"--yes, but the function in the adult is not the cause of their formation in the embryo, though it may be the reason for them. The cause is the action of genes and chromosomes, which indeed takes place before the effect.
And then there's the whole question of what "before" means anyway. I know that there's ongoing discussion in physics about the relation between time and causality--for example, "Can an effect precede its cause? A model of a noncausal world," whose abstract reads
The world appears causal in the sense that the result of a measurement may depend on the past history of the observed system, but not on what the experimenter will do with the system after the measurement. This raises the question whether noncausality at a macroscopic level would necessarily lead to an unreasonable world. The study of a model world with axiomatically well-specified properties shows that noncausal systems can be discussed in a logically consistent manner so that noncausality might well exist in the real world as a weak, but so far overlooked, effect.Apparently there's also a point of view that time is a property of causality rather than the other way around. I'm not going to pretend I can discuss the nuances of all this intelligently, but it does seem that what appears to be inverse causality to us may just be a function of our being trapped in linear time.
==My main issue with the paper is that, as far as I can tell, his argument about living organisms is based on the capabilities of nonliving things.
Yes, he’s saying that the structure of life is not reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics, which is one of the reasons that he calls naturalistic evolution a Polyani impossibility.
==I think we can all agree that living things have unique capabilities, so claiming restrictions on what life can do based on what nonliving things can do strikes me as an unwarranted logical leap.
But isn’t that the whole point of neo-Darwinian evolution: namely that evolution is a product of random mutations plus natural selection? Are you positing that random mutations aren’t random, and that natural selection isn’t natural?