10.20.08
False dualism, design, natural selection
Natural selection is widely supposed to be an information ratchet that gradually accumulates the information organisms need to acquire novel adaptations. Yet natural selection is nothing of the sort.
Dembski to Speak on Darwin at Baylor University Tuesday Night
According to ASA-Baylor, this is what Dembski will speak on:
The Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation is a low-level trial-and-error method for solving routine problems that is unequipped to handle the innovative problems that biological systems have solved in the course of natural history. Darwinism and evolutionary biology more generally, committed as they are to unguided material mechanisms, do not have the resources to solve biology’s information problem. This talk will indicate why biology’s information problem is unresolvable apart from intelligent design.
This statement works beautifully until it reaches the last sentence, where the ID movements tactics are shown in evidence: stage a false dualism, natural selection and design. And it is false.
We have to explain how things evolve, and that opens a void where our ignorance can’t be resolved by the ‘plug in’ terms, natural selection, intelligent design.
The old time secular Darwin critics find their criticisms coopted by these tactics.