09.02.08
ID gang salivates over Nagel
Evo-News reports on Nagel.
It is good, at least, to actually hear from someone like Nagel (you won’t hear anything from Scienceblogs), and his opinion as a Darwin skeptic is worth something, good to know, that much I grant evo-news, all that right wing $, they can afford Nagel’s essay. The attitude of Darwinists that Darwin refuted design is false, but then, so what? But if anything is true it is that a perfectly natural stance toward design might be simple ambivalence. Kant is the perfect example. He struggled mightily with the temptations of design, for the simple reason that design seems to make sense, but he, next to Hume, knew that he could not arrive at proof, that is, science. So he said so.
But with the ID people this wariness is absent, because they have created a version of design that really makes sense only on the basis of prior faith. And the irony is that the ID movement has destroyed the design argument. We can never again trust the design argument’s proponents in the way we can trust a figure such as Kant.
In any case, Nagel’s comments on the problems of Darwinism are acute. Note how one after another the Darwin critics get deep-sixed, and we learn of them from non-science quarters.
Why not just put this paper out in public for free. $26, c’mon. that’s censorship.
The Darwin disgrace.
Prof. Nagel tells us that he “has for a long time been skeptical of the claims of traditional evolutionary theory to be the whole story about the history of life” (p. 202). He reports that it is “difficult to find in the accessible literature the grounds” for these claims.
Moreover, he goes farther. He reports that the “presently available evidence” comes “nothing close” to establishing “the sufficiency of standard evolutionary mechanisms to account for the entire evolution of life” (p. 199).
He notes that his judgment is supported by two prominent scientists (Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, writing in the Oct. 2005 book Plausibility of Life), who also recognized that (prior to offering their own theory, at least) the “available evidence” did not “decisively settle[]” whether mutations in DNA “are entirely due to chance” (p. 191). And he cites one Stuart Kauffman, a “complexity theorist who defends a naturalistic theory of emergence,” that random mutation “is not sufficient” to explain DNA (p. 192).
Prof. Nagel acknowledges that “evolutionary biologists” regularly say that they are “confiden[t]” that “random mutations in DNA” are sufficient to account for “the complex chemical systems we observe” in living things (p. 199) — but he disagrees. “Rhetoric” is the word Professor Nagel uses to rejects these statements of credentialed evolutionary biologists. He judges that the evidence is NOT sufficient to rule out ID (p. 199).