Divine Evolution

Article, quote below, at Tech Central on the Darwin debate, 'Divine Evolution'

The idea of graduating from strict Darwinism with its omnipotent natural selection to the realm of complex systems theory is a good one, and has been suggested many times, cf. for example Robert Wesson in Beyond Natural Selection. The problem is verify that also, since verifying natural selection is very difficult and any other candidate will suffer the same problem. But the point is Darwin's theory has been made into the defining rubric for evolution, reality, everything, and it won't work. There is a broad avenue of ways to extend 'methodological naturalism', even to include the issue of teleology, or at least directionality of some kind.In the Kantian framework 'design' questions are given a special guarded status, in the distinction of constitutive and regulative judgments. While this would be a fruitful approach you can't very well do it that way and get a hearing in the deafening noise of the ID fallacy. But there is nothing wrong with the Kantian 'as if' approach as long you don't cheat, and ID folks will cheat, and take that as proof.Kant also shows the inherent ambiguity in the definition of the organism, its conformance to causal laws, and yet its mysterious teleological logic, this codified in his 'antinomies of teleological judgment'.The systems approach needs a hearing, however, but it needs to find an extension that can deal with these critical Kantian objections/insights.

Anyway, systems thinking in biology is progress, how far anyone can get, another question.In the Kantian framework important limits are suspected to lurk in any attempt at the question, beset with inherent contradictions of all space-time-causal theories.All this was actually a research school in the early nineteenth century, among the so-called teleomechanists, and they got the first glimpse of what is now being rediscovered as evo-devo two hundred years later, if anyone can still recover from the Darwin muddle.For lots on this,http://www.history-and-evolution.com/kant/index.htm

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From Tech Central
Frederick Turner Oscar Wilde remarked that to be happy it is not enough to be a success; our friends must fail. Religious views -- whether theistic or atheistic -- are, alas, the same: for our view to be right, all the others must be wrong.

But as the evolution/design debate develops, more serious and thoughtful voices have joined in -- people whose thinking does not seem to be limited by partisan or ideological preconceptions, and who are not making the issue, as others have, a proxy for a fight about theology or atheism. Such voices include TCS's Lee Harris, James Pinkerton, and Nick Schulz, and the participants in the interesting dialogue at Natural History magazine. "Old-earth" Intelligent Design proponents accept that the universe may have started 13 billion years ago with a Big Bang, that the Earth is at least 4 billion years old, and that "microevolution", the diversification of species into strains and breeds, can occur through selection. Some even accept that different species and genera can diverge from a common ancestor (though they insist that at least the major transitions -- from nonliving matter to life, from life to consciousness -- required some kind of special intervention, literally a miracle). A common vocabulary is emerging. The ground may now be prepared for a transformation of the debate from a partisan wrangle into a true conversation, a fruitful inquiry that includes good biological science but does not exclude the insights of other disciplines.