Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Darwinism's Rules of Reasoning: Phillip Johnson on Pierre Grasse
From "Darwinism's Rules of Reasoning" (Chapter 1 of "Darwinism: Science or Philosophy") by Phillip Johnson:
"MY STARTING POINT is a book review that Theodosius Dobzhansky published in 1975, critiquing Pierre Grasse's The Evolution of Life.{1} Grasse, an eminent French zoologist, believed in something that he called "evolution." So did Dobzhansky, but when Dobzhansky used that term he meant neo-Darwinism, evolution propelled by random mutation and guided by natural selection. Grasse used the same term to refer to something very different, a poorly understood process of transformation in which one general category (like reptiles) gave rise to another (like mammals), guided by mysterious "internal factors" that seemed to compel many individual lines of descent to converge at a new form of life. Grasse denied emphatically that mutation and selection have the power to create new complex organs or body plans, explaining that the intra-species variation that results from DNA copying errors is mere fluctuation, which never leads to any important innovation."
Full text at:
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/fte/darwinism/chapter1.html
[For more on Grasse see: Grasse, Behe, and "Irreducible Complexity"]
technorati tags: darwinism, science, philosophy, dobzhansky, grasse, evolution, neo-Darwinism, transformation, reptiles, mammals, internal+factors, life, mutation, selection, DNA, body+plans, innovation, Phillip+Johnson
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