Category Archives: Science

Following on from my post yesterday there is something else significant to be considered if the Neodarwinian paradigm should soon be modified, extended or even swept away altogether. I quoted Jablonka and Lamb’s list of just some of the processes and issues now being incorporated into a twenty-first century view of evolution. Molecular biological insights, new mutational mechanisms, HGT, ecology (including niche construction), behaviour and culture were listed. They might have added developmental issues, epigenetics and other non-genetic inheritance, physiological condiderations as per Denis Noble, symbiosis, hybridisation, etc etc. Some of these are unarguable, others more speculative. But they all serve to make evolution far more complicated, which is, in … Continue reading →

Hmm – a comment of mine on Uncommon Descent seems to have been promoted into a post. Not sure about the thread’s title, but the answer is “Goddidit.” I feel I’m changing into a design…

The second half of the Attenborough series on vertebrates, which I watched last night, kept the teleology  coming. I guess it’s pretty plausible to say that because marsupial young are at risk of predation and infection, mammals needed to develop a placenta so they could be born well-developed. However, to be strictly ateleological one ought to say that those mammals that happened to develop a specialised uterus equipped for gas and nutrient exchange and massive growth capacity, and a modified lower genital tract, muscular and skeletal structure to allow live birth of large offspring, together of course with greatly enlarged lactation gear and radically altered habits of nurture; at the same … Continue reading →

David Attenborough is by far the greatest populariser of evolution this side of the Atlantic – far more so than the Gnu posterboy Richard Dawkins – and I suppose, because of the sheer quality of BBC documentaries, perhaps he is on the western side as well. But what kind of evolution does he actually believe? It’s pretty clear from interviews and pronouncements on the subject itself that he’s a fan of Darwin, and doesn’t depart in any important respect from classical Neodarwinism. But the stuff he prepares for popular consumption – that by which he has become a “public institution” – paradoxically preaches a quite different doctrine. And that actually … Continue reading →