HOW Quasi truths and absurdities
reach such heights of importance and
public relevance !!!???
Under any pure logic, the story/tale of
Santa Claus is just as good or better !
At least he brings once a year "presents"
to all the children of the World ...!
___________________________
february 12 1809-1882
Darwin’s Greatest Discovery:
Design Without Designer
FRANCIS CO J. AYALA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11790.html
Darwin’s greatest contribution to science is that he completed the Copernican Revolution by drawing out for biology the notion of nature as a system of matter in motion governed by natural laws. With Darwin’s discovery of natural selection, the origin and adaptations of organisms were brought into the realm of science.
The adaptive features of organisms could now be explained, like the phenomena of the inanimate world, as the result of natural processes, without recourse to an Intelligent Designer. The Copernican and the Darwinian Revolutions may be seen as the two stages of the one Scientific Revolution. They jointly ushered in the beginning of science in the modern sense of the word: explanation through natural laws. Darwin’s theory of natural selection accounts for the ‘‘design’’ of organisms, and for their wondrous diversity, as the result of natural processes, the gradual accumulation of spontaneously arisen variations (mutations) sorted out by natural selection.
Which characteristics will be selected depends on which variations happen to be present at a given time in a given place. This in turn depends on the random process of mutation as well as on the previous history of the organisms.
Mutation and selection have jointly driven the marvelous process that, starting from microscopic organisms, has yielded orchids, birds, and humans. The theory of evolution conveys chance and
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Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, 321 Steinhaus
Hall, Irvine, CA 92697.
Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
In the Light of Evolution: Volume 1. Adaptation and Complex Design
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11790.html
/ Francisco J. Ayala
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necessity, randomness and determinism, jointly enmeshed in the stuff of life. This was Darwin’s fundamental discovery, that there is a process that is creative, although not conscious.
There is a version of the history of the ideas that sees a parallel between the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions. In this view, the Copernican Revolution consisted in displacing the Earth from its previously accepted locus as the center of the universe and moving it to a subordinate place as just one more planet revolving around the sun. In congruous manner, the Darwinian Revolution is viewed as consisting of the displacement of humans from their exalted position as the center of life on earth, with all other species created for the service of humankind.
According to this version of intellectual history, Copernicus had accomplished his revolution with the heliocentric theory of the solar system.
Darwin’s achievement emerged from his theory of organic evolution.
What this version of the two revolutions says is correct but inadequate, because it misses what is most important about these two intellectual revolutions, namely that they ushered in the beginning of science in the modern sense of the word. These two revolutions may jointly be seen as the one Scientific Revolution, with two stages, the Copernican and the Darwinian.
The Copernican Revolution was launched with the publication in 1543, the year of Nicolaus Copernicus’ death, of his De revolutionibus orbium celestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), and bloomed with the publication in 1687 of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). The discoveries by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others, in the 16th and 17th centuries, had gradually ushered in a conception of the universe as matter in motion governed by natural laws. It was shown that Earth is not the center of the universe but a small planet rotating around an average star; that the universe is immense in space and in time; and that the motions of the planets around the sun can be explained by the same simple laws that account for the motion of physical objects on our planet, laws such as f = m × a (force = mass × acceleration) or the inverse-square law of attraction, f = g(m1m2)/r2 (the force of attraction between two bodies is directly proportional to their masses, but inversely related to the square of the distance between them).
These and other discoveries greatly expanded human knowledge. The conceptual revolution they brought about was more fundamental yet: a commitment to the postulate that the universe obeys immanent laws that account for natural phenomena. The workings of the universe were brought into the realm of science: explanation through natural laws. All
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Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
In the Light of Evolution: Volume 1. Adaptation and Complex Design
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11790.html
Darwin’s Greatest Discovery /
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physical phenomena could be accounted for as long as the causes were adequately known.
The advances of physical science brought about by the Copernican Revolution had driven mankind’s conception of the universe to a split personality state of affairs, which persisted well into the mid-19th century. Scientific explanations, derived from natural laws, dominated the world of nonliving matter, on the Earth as well as in the heavens. However, supernatural explanations, which depended on the unfathomable deeds of the Creator, were accepted as explanations of the origin and configuration of living creatures. Authors, such as William Paley, argued that the complex design of organisms could not have come about by chance or by the mechanical laws of physics, chemistry, and astronomy but was rather accomplished by an Intelligent Designer, just as the complexity of a watch, designed to tell time, was accomplished by an intelligent watchmaker.
It was Darwin’s genius to resolve this conceptual schizophrenia.
Darwin completed the Copernican Revolution by drawing out for biology the notion of nature as a lawful system of matter in motion that human reason can explain without recourse to supernatural agencies. The conundrum faced by Darwin can hardly be overestimated. The strength of the argument from design to demonstrate the role of the Creator had been forcefully set forth by philosophers and theologians.
Wherever there is function or design, we look for its author. It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.
The origin and adaptations of organisms in their profusion and wondrous variations were thus brought into the realm of science. Darwin accepted that organisms are ‘‘designed’’ for certain purposes, that is, they are functionally organized. Organisms are adapted to certain ways of life and their parts are adapted to perform certain functions. Fish are adapted to live in water, kidneys are designed to regulate the composition of blood, and the human hand is made for grasping. But Darwin went on to provide a natural explanation of the design. The seemingly purposeful aspects of living beings could now be explained, like the phenomena of the inanimate world, by the methods of science, as the result of natural laws manifested in natural processes.
Darwin occupies an exalted place in the history of Western thought, deservedly receiving credit for the theory of evolution. In The Origin of Species, published in 1859, he laid out the evidence demonstrating the evolution of organisms. Darwin did not use the term ‘‘evolution,’’ which did not have its current meaning, but referred to the evolution of organisms by the phrase ‘‘common descent with modification’’ and similar expres
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Copyright© National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
In the Light of Evolution: Volume 1. Adaptation and Complex Design
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11790.html
/ Francisco J. Ayala
----------------------------------------
sions. However, Darwin accomplished something much more important for intellectual history than demonstrating evolution. Indeed, accumulating evidence for common descent with diversification may very well have been a subsidiary objective of Darwin’s masterpiece. Darwin’s Origin of Species is, first and foremost, a sustained effort to solve the problem of how to account scientifically for the design of organisms. Darwin seeks to explain the design of organisms, their complexity, diversity, and marvelous contrivances, as the result of natural processes. Darwin brings about the evidence for evolution because evolution is a necessary consequence of his theory of design.
CHANCE AND NECESSITY:
NATURAL SELECTION AS A CREATIVE PROCESS
The fossil record shows that life has evolved in a haphazard fashion. The radiations of some groups of organisms, the numerical and territorial expansions of other groups, the replacement of some kinds of organisms by other kinds, the occasional but irregular occurrence of trends toward increased size or other sorts of change, and the ever-present extinctions are best explained by natural selection of organisms subject to the vagaries of genetic mutation, environmental challenge, and past history.
The scientific account of these events does not necessitate recourse to a preordained plan, whether imprinted from the beginning or through successive interventions by an omniscient and almighty Designer. Biological evolution differs from a painting or an artifact in that it is not the outcome of preconceived design. The design of organisms is not intelligent but imperfect and, at times, outright dysfunctional.
Natural selection accounts for the ‘‘design’’ of organisms because adaptive variations tend to increase the probability of survival and reproduction of their carriers at the expense of maladaptive, or less adaptive, variations. The arguments of intelligent design proponents that state the incredible improbability of chance events, such as mutation, to account for the adaptations of organisms are irrelevant because evolution is not governed by random mutations. Rather, there is a natural process (namely, natural selection) that is not random but oriented and able to generate order or ‘‘create.’’ The traits that organisms acquire in their evolutionary histories are not fortuitous but rather determined by their functional utility to the organisms, designed, as it were, to serve their life needs.
Chance is, nevertheless, an integral part of the evolutionary process. The mutations that yield the hereditary variations available to natural selection arise at random. Mutations are random or chance events because (i) they are rare exceptions to the fidelity of the process of DNA replication and because (ii) there is no way of knowing which gene will mutate in a particular cell or in a particular individual. However, the meaning
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Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
In the Light of Evolution: Volume 1. Adaptation and Complex Design
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11790.html
Darwin’s Greatest Discovery / 21
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of ‘‘random’’ that is most significant for understanding the evolutionary process is (iii) that mutations are unoriented with respect to adaptation; they occur independently of whether or not they are beneficial or harmful to the organisms. Some are beneficial, most are not, and only the beneficial ones become incorporated in the organisms through natural selection.
The adaptive randomness of the mutation process (as well as the vagaries of other processes that come to play in the great theater of life) is counteracted by natural selection, which preserves what is useful and eliminates what is harmful. Without hereditary mutations, evolution could not happen because there would be no variations that could be differentially conveyed from one to another generation. But without natural selection, the mutation process would yield disorganization and extinction because most mutations are disadvantageous.
Mutation and selection have jointly driven the marvelous process that, starting from microscopic organisms, has yielded orchids, birds, and humans. The theory of evolution conveys chance and necessity jointly enmeshed in the stuff of life; randomness and determinism interlocked in a natural process that has spurted the most complex, diverse, and beautiful entities that we know of in the universe: the organisms that populate the Earth, including humans who think and love, endowed with free will and creative powers, and able to analyze the process of evolution itself that brought them into existence. This is Darwin’s fundamental discovery, that there is a process that is creative although not conscious. And this is the conceptual revolution that Darwin completed: the idea that the design of living organisms can be accounted for as the result of natural processes governed by natural laws. This is nothing if not a fundamental vision that has forever changed how mankind perceives itself and its place in the universe.
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...If the above is not a result of entirely my
Book of Pure Logic or a partial result from my
book. It sure would seem so to me !
...If anything in Evolution makes sense to anybody,
especially a PhD Scientist, I am sure they do not
know the basic common sense usage of thought,
analysis and logic, further defined as pure/complete
logic.
...Anyway my book is in accordance as to using
this terminology to the contrary of the justification
of modern Science Evolution ! THEY CLAIM THEY
HAVE COME TO STAY FOR GOOD, AND SCIENCE HAS
"PROGRESSED" WITH DARWIN AND EVOLUTION !
My Book proves the contrary !
...On another darwinian celebration, of "nutty"
gorillas and apes that govern and manage Academia,
Science and Governments ! So be it that they have
come to stay ! As also ancient Academia Theology !
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