Category Archives: Philosophy

I continue to be intrigued by the ubiquity of evolutionary stasis as described by Donald Prothero, for example in this piece. It is the breadth and depth of his evidence that makes his case so striking, but the strapline would be: In four of the biggest climatic-vegetational events of the last 50 million years, the mammals and birds show no noticeable change in response to changing climates.

The Independent reports some research from the “1000 Genome Project”, under the headline “Human genome study reveals certain genes are less essential than previously thought”. The gist is that in 2,500 individual genomes studied (a supererogatory number in terms of the project’s name): “…we were surprised to see over 200 genes that are missing entirely in some people,” said Jan Korbel of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, who led one of the genome project’s studies.

An unusually perceptive, and rather charitable, piece by Justin Topp on BioLogos just now, on the subject of why people “stubbornly” persist in their particular ways of approaching origins issues. He bases his thesis on the “research program” concept of philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, and exemplifies what he means by his own journey which (rather refreshingly for BioLogos!) didn’t begin with his being indoctrinated in Young Earth Creationism as a kid. Instead he came to it by rational choice, though he abandoned it for Evolutionary Creation as a student.

When the first attempts were made at serious natural philosophy by the Greeks two and a half millennia ago, the most fundamental disagreement was between those who held that chance was at the root of the world, and those who considered there was direction to it, telos. In the former category would be the atomists like Democritus and Lucretius, and in reaction to them were those like Plato and, particularly, Aristototle, who held the teleological view.