Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It is the new book by physiologist J. Scott Turner, author of The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself.
The book may make some “skeptics” uncomfortable, but maybe they should read it anyways.
From the book:
I have come to believe that there is something presently wrong with how we scientists think about life, its existence, its origins, and its evolution.
Without a coherent theory of life, whatever we think about life doesn’t hold water. This applies to the major contribution we claim that the modern science of life offers to the popular culture: Darwinism.
… there sits at the heart of modern Darwinism an unresolved tautology that undermines its validity.
… do we have a coherent theory of evolution? The firmly settled answer to this question is supposed to be “yes” …
I intend to argue in this book that the answer to my question might actually be “no.”
Darwinism is an idea of intoxicating beauty, and yet there has been for many years a muddle at the heart of it, at least in its modern form.
… what it cannot explain is coming into stark relief, making it impossible any longer to ignore the muddle.
The problem for modern Darwinism is, I argue, that we lack a coherent theory of the core Darwinian concept of adaptation.
This type of reasoning is known formally as a tautology…
For Darwinism to make sense (and I want deeply for it to make sense), the tautology somehow needs to be resolved.
… the obstacle to resolving the tautology is not that we know too little — far from it — but that we aren’t thinking properly about what we do know. In short, the obstacle is largely philosophical, and the stumbling block is the frank purposefulness that is inherent in the phenomenon of adaptation.
… the uncomfortable question is this: what if phenomena like intentionality, purpose, and design are not illusions, but are quite real — are in fact the central attributes of life? How can we have a coherent theory of life that tries to shunt these phenomena to the side? And if we don’t have a coherent theory of life, how can we have a coherent theory of evolution?
– Turner, J. Scott. Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It. HarperCollins. 2017.
Biology, we have a problem. He wants Darwinism to make sense, but the book just doesn’t start out well for the Darwin disciples. Maybe someone else here will actually read it and explain how misguided this poor author is. He’s a Christian. Maybe he’s just lying for Jesus.
Another nail in the coffin.
If you look carefully at how Aquinas phrases his arguments, you’ll notice a gap between what he has established by argument and its relation to religious belief. He’ll establish that there must be a necessary being, but then says, ‘and this everyone agrees to call God’. He does not logically demonstrate that the necessary being must be God. He doesn’t even give us reasons for thinking that the necessary being might be God. He just says that everyone agrees that it is.
I don’t think there are any arguments that could allow us to assign greater likelihood (or any other epistemic virtues) to God or to the multiverse.
I always end up shaking my head at Mung. Accepts NS, accepts drift, common descent up to a point, all the nuts and bolts, then says something along the lines of ‘evolution is silly’ or ‘it’s incoherent’.
Allan Miller,
The idea that there are shelves of books on an incoherent subject is fascinating. Yet we stumble trying to define the most basic of the subjects terms.
No, I’m an example of socialist postmodernity!
In that sense all of science supports atheism. But we know that all science does not support atheism. So you can’t be correct.
What? You mean like IDists? So your beliefs don’t require the whole unguided part then huh Allan?
There is a good opportunity for a book about the new path for the New Atheist. Since Darwinism is getting a little too messy to hang onto, they need something else.
I mean just look at all the materialist here scavenging the Earth trying to articulate this whole, “Well, some parts of Darwin still might be useful in theory, but some parts are a Third way, and its not exactly Darwinist in its mechanisms, and sure there is some teleology involved, and you see physical laws might explain the existence of some of the mechanism once we delve deeper, and systems are different from the individual parts don’t you see, let’s not argument of what does what and how, the modern synthesis has plenty of room for expansion without explosion…who cares how true Darwinism is anyway, is it useful is the question…Empirically speaking, who is to say what lies at the core…Vaisheshika darsana says that perception is everything, you know…”
The movement needs a name though. Too bad Hitchens isn’t still around. Coyne is such a bore, and Dawkins is a little too busy right now explaining how he is not a racist and all. What’s Krauss up to?
Kicking his own children out of his house and refusing to let them have their cat is exactly what we would expect from a Darwinist.
colewd,
And yet, we don’t. Is there really much confusion in defining selection, drift, recombination, migration, fixation &c? Really? Playing with definitions appears to be pretty much all you guys have got, hence you flog that nag till she can be rode no more.
I already had you pegged as a Truth Project kind of guy. Here’s a little wooden box for you to use as an indoctrination aid. Have you seen Dr. (always emphasize doctor, even if the doctorate is in management) Del Tackett’s new YEC documentary, Is Genesis History? I’ve managed to stomach only the first 30 minutes (on Netflix). The highlight was Paul Nelson noting that YEC’s difference from the mainstream is not their view of science, but instead their view of history.
fitness
species
adaptation
homology
The list goes on and on
And more to the point, the book featured by the OP makes this same case.
That’s it, The Socialist Postmodernist Third Way of Guidance without Guidance! The Universal Theory of Un-Universalism in a Godless World.
Ok, well, there is no hurry I guess. There are still a lot of Darwinists like Rumraket who still don’t get it yet.
phoodoo,
Sigh. No. My beliefs, or otherwise, in God have nothing to do with my biological interests. As I have told you I don’t know how many times.
Here’s a heads-up: I didn’t read past the line I quoted. Because a phoodoo-post typically consists of getting something wrong, and then riffing about it increasingly excitably for 10 minutes or so. So, if you have a point to get across, and you want it read, make it quick.
Mung,
At least I didn’t plant a Tree, tell them not to eat the fruit, and visit punishment on all future generations when they did.
Kantian Naturalist,
He certainly does not prove God but makes a logical argument for an uncaused cause of creation.
Are you positioning the multiverse as the alternative to intentional creation?
Mung,
Yeah, and you’re hopelessly confused by this most difficult of subjects, aren’t you Mung? Poor fella.
Now you know why I speak of evolutionary theories.
The question is, what dose it mean for a theory to be coherent. What must be true of that theory?
See what Darwinism has spawned! It’s Evil!
Well, that’s NOT QUITE all the nuts and bolts now is it Allan?
There’s this little part about some random mutations causing all the novelty in the world you might want to take a look at. I know, I know, its one of those little messy remnants of Darwinism pestering everyone and you all would love to be able to finally throw it overboard already, but yet…
Anyway, the new book should be out pretty soon once Krauss or Sam Harris or Degrasse-Tyson can find the time.
Tom English,
I have not seen it yet. I don’t currently find the YEC arguments convincing. Do you think they make a credible argument in this movie?
Mung,
No, I really don’t. Or, I don’t know why the singular-vs-plural matters. Lamarckism is a theory of evolution. ID is, in some flavours. But there does not seem to be a multiplicity of theories of evolution in modern biology. You seem to crow every time someone talks of something like transposition, as if that is a ‘theory of evolution’. Or common descent, as if that is another.
What is not true of modern evolutionary theory? Which of – say – mutation, selection, drift, recombination, fixation, migration or common descent is untrue or incoherent?
I’m interested—so long as you define “epistemically significant” and defend your first premise (the one that contains that term).
phoodoo,
Mung can speak for himself I suppose, but yes, even that. I doubt that Mung thinks every single mutation is ‘nonrandom’ in the sense you appear to intend – ie, directed. I may be wrong.
[eta – I missed the universal – ‘all the novelty’. So if that is one of the ‘nuts and bolts’ of evolutionary theory – then yeah, I am guilty of not defining the ‘nuts and bolts’ of evolutionary theory to mean its entirety. 🙂 ]
colewd,
Kinda, but I’d have no desire to read ’em. The shelves on ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ in my local bookshop dwarf those on science. All points of the woo-compass. My wife buys ’em buy the bucketload; drives me up the wall!
As long as you don’t need evidence for that claim, either, I guess you can think what you want.
If you wanted to support it with evidence instead of wishful thinking you’d need to know a good deal more. And then it would be too late, as you’d know better.
Glen Davidson
And clears everything up with a definition of homeostasis.
(Fun fact to know and tell: Long ago, I was a partner in a med-tech startup, working on an advanced patient monitoring system for use in intensive care units. Perhaps Dr. Turner would like to tell us how simple it is to detect departures from homeostasis. It would be rather more helpful if he were to use the term phenomenon in the sense that scientists ordinarily do. I don’t hold out much hope for recognizing, even with the most advanced of sensors and signal processing techniques, a body’s desire to return to homeostasis.)
GlenDavidson,
Most my ideas on atheism come from Dawkins arguments, Here is a critique from the NY Times
Here he claims that an intelligent designer is harder to explain then natural selection yet we know natural selection is limited in explaining all the origin issues including life, matter, complex adaptions.
So it doesn’t even occur to you that your reliance upon Dawkins is inadequate, even as you use an NYT review to note that it’s inadequate?
Keep killing those strawmen, they’re a real menace.
Glen Davidson
I was an atheist long before Dawkins appeared on the scene. Before I’d heard of atheism, indeed. Never even read The God Delusion, though his biology stuff is enjoyable and thought-provoking.
I think we’ve found the problem right there.
While we’re at it, maybe we should not forget that “The New York Times” isn’t a person, much less an unbiased and objective agency. Quite possibly, the review was written by an actual person, and if so, quite possibly that person has “discovered” why Dawkins’ views on religion differ from his own, ipso facto becoming inadequate as a result. Just sayin’
But perhaps the problem doesn’t lie with Dawkins, but rather with the baggage that ALL of us bring to any such material. I admit upfront that I regard gods as superstitious nonsense, and I agree with Dawkins that inculcating small children with such humbug while they’re going through the “take everything an adult tells you at face value” phase constitutes child abuse.
And by the time such people reach an age where they can present coherent arguments, their priors are completely fucked. You probably understand better than any of us that logical, coherent, rational arguments founded on idiotic axioms lead to idiotic conclusions. Which idiocy is invisible to anyone why buys into those axioms.
Gutting’s essay on Dawkins can be found here. His criticism of Dawkins’s argument is quite good.
Kantian Naturalist,
Soon as someone says ‘necessary being’, I switch off. I can’t even make sense of the concept. Of course, if universes can’t even exist without necessary beings, then fair enough, but …
I concede that I don’t get the things you don’t know how to explain but somehow still think are wrong. I also don’t get how that’s my problem.
That’s a problem. Literally none of my ideas on atheism come from Dawkins arguments.
And you call yourself part of the atheist conspiracy?
Glen Davidson
SHHH. The first rule of the nonexistant atheistic conspiracy is that you’re not supposed to mention the nonexistant atheistic conspiracy, at least not without also calling it the nonexistant atheistic conspiracy.
Mung,
Tell us specifically what you think is incoherent about it.
KN,
I think it’s pretty poor, relying as it does on “divine simplicity” and “necessary being” arguments, but that’s a topic for another thread. (I’ve been thinking of doing an OP on divine simplicity; this may spur me to grind it out.)
The argument for the existence of a necessary being depends on the principle of sufficient reason (more precisely: it depends on how one understands the principle). Erik and I went back-and-forth about this last year, I think.
I think that if one accepts the principle, then the argument is both valid and sound. It just doesn’t show what theists think it shows, because there’s no reason to think that the necessary being is anything like God as described by any sacred text of the Abrahamic religions.
No. Or rather, read the thread. Read the book the thread is about.
“…we do not presently have a coherent theory of adaptation, nor a coherent theory of life, nor a coherent theory of evolution.”
Go ahead, lol. Jump in the deep end of the pool when you can’t even swim yet.
Kantian Naturalist,
Likely ‘not well’, in my case! 😉 I don’t think one can take it as fundamental that everything must have a cause. There could be just one exception. We can’t necessarily export intuitions about causality inside universes to their origination.
If one must go that way, what is gained by sticking ‘God’ in there? The child’s question – “yes, but what about God … ?” is pretty obvious.
Mung,
Do you actually understand why Turner thinks that evolutionary theory is incoherent?
I ask because you seem to be afraid to explain Turner’s ideas in your own words, preferring instead to quote him verbatim.
Mung,
Does it have a coherent argument against evolution’s coherence, beyond a few statements about what the author lacks (he can leave me out of that ‘we’)?
Says Mung, who’s as bad at theology as he is at evolution, ID, and Bible studies.
KN,
There’s no reason to think the necessary being is God-like, period.
The Book of Job is all about brute facts. God can do whatever he wants to you and your loved ones, for reasons that, if you knew them, would seem arbitrary. When God appears to Job in a whirlwind, he makes much of Job’s abject incomprehension of His Creation. Chapters 38-41 are anathema to ID. So the fine Christian culture warriors ignore entirely a remarkable passage in which God speaks, and hang their helmets instead on a sentence in a letter by Harry Dean Stanton (perfect casting; RIP).
I call bullshit.
Prove me wrong.
I call bullshit on your calling bullshit! Prove me wrong!