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.
LOL
Mung,
He who calls bullshit last calls bullshit best.
I think Dean Martin said that. Or was it, “All you are is a dollar sign to me Jerry.”
Whatever.
They can’t put up.
And they won’t shut up.
LOL
First keiths has to demonstrate he understands the meaning of the word incoherent.
It could have been that. Martin said a lot of things when he was drunk.
I really would like to see someone demonstrate that the theory of evolution is incoherent.
After Mung shows that he knows the meaning of the word in this context.
I think, in this context, “the word” means the visual representation of the symbols you typed on the computer, which appear on our screens, intended to convey the mental concept of “the word”. What you have done is convert meaning into an image (electronic in this case, thus it doesn’t really exist in a true visual form, but what does exist mean anyway, and as KN would tell you, what does to know mean, other than we have to trust our senses, even though we have no empirical way to know if we can, but setting aside the physicality of electronic conversions of meanings…), which we, in turn, convert back into a thought, thus through symbols you manipulate our (those who chose to be manipulated, which is another story) brains.
Is that right?
Question: If I chose to allow you to manipulate my brain, who is doing the manipulating?
That might be one for Keiths, because he doesn’t want that choice. He wants his brain to be manipulated without his choosing. And not just his brain, everyone’s brain. He wants to choose for everyone to not let them choose-which is tough to wrap your head around if you choose. I think he secretly has a crush on Mother Teresa. He wants to be cared for.
Mung,
Since you lack the ability to explain why Turner thinks evolutionary theory is incoherent, at least provide a quote from the book in which Turner himself does so.
You’ve been hiding behind Turner’s words throughout the thread. Surely you can do so one more time.
Phoodoo seems to be bad at everything, including putting words in other people’s mouths.
Pedant,
It’s easy to tell that they’re bluffing. If either of them could actually demonstrate that evolutionary theory was incoherent, he’d seize the opportunity instead of fumbling around for excuses not to.
Mung running away from backing up one of his endless line of trollish and mostly contentless assertions? Say it aint so.
Rumraket:
Stalling, squirming, and skedaddling: a Mung specialty.
And of all people Mother Theresa is among the last people I would have caring for me. She deliberately prolonged and intensified the sufferings of the sick because she thought suffering brought you closer to God.
Rumraket,
Yep. This comment is why phoodoo felt compelled to mention her.
And people wonder why Lizzie left.
A kiss from Jesus.
But you don’t do that. Oh no. Or if you do it, you do a good job of it, not a bad job of it, like phoodoo.
#MoteBeam
Do you know yet what incoherent means?
We demonstrate that evolutionary theory is incoherent every day by our obvious ignorance of it. 🙂
keiths,
Your are so shy about stating your feelings about what a loving God would be like, so we just have to assume based on your complaints.
Evidently, derisive, inane bluffing is all these three stooges are able to do.
No, that’s not true. For one, I can find authors who agree with me. See the OP.
Mung,
Side step a burden shift, extract a weak claim, and slay it. Priceless 🙂
Mung:
Then this should be no problem for you:
I saw it the fist time. What do you think you add by repeating yourself?
So stop stalling and provide a quote.
colewd,
Wha? I could find ‘authors who agreed with me’ if I said the earth was flat. You are easily impressed.
Allan Miller,
A weak claim does not require a sharp sword. 🙂
What the Darwinian consensus has brought us, therefore, is more dogma than science.
– J. Scott Turner
Are you calling bullshit on my calling bullshit on his calling bullshit?
You provide one. You’re the one who is calling for quotes.
Mung,
That’s pitiful, Mung. You don’t even know why Turner thinks evolutionary theory is incoherent, do you?
All Mung and his altar boys are asked to do is demonstrate that evolution is incoherent.
It appears that they haven’t because they can’t.
Pitiful fail.
Pedant:
Here’s the most pitiful part:
a) not only can’t Mung explain why evolutionary theory is supposedly incoherent, or
b) explain why Turner thinks it’s incoherent;
c) he can’t even supply a quote from Turner explaining why it’s incoherent.
In other words, Mung saw the word “incoherent” and barked like a trained seal. That’s the extent of his understanding.
I was sampling from Purpose and Desire over dinner and came across this cringeworthy quote near the end of the book:
colewd,
I’ve made it through only 30 minutes of the documentary. I was interested in knowing whether you were familiar with Del Tackett and The Truth Project.
J. Scott Turner said it, so it’s true by default.
The weird thing about Turner’s book is that part of the time he asserts that cognition, intentionality, homeostasis, etc., are somehow magical and beyond the reach of “mere mechanism”; yet at other times he deflates them to the point where they are easily explicable in terms of mechanism.
Here’s an example of the latter:
So why on earth does Turner think that cognition, which he defines in this case as “the mapping of information about the external environment onto the cell’s internal workings,” is out of reach for “mere mechanism”?
Here’s another quote:
Again, with such a deflated view of cognition, where’s the magic? Why does Turner believe that it’s out of reach for “mere mechanism”?
Turner appears to be bamboozling himself. He starts out by convincing himself that cognition is magic and cannot be reduced to mere mechanism. He then deflates cognition so that he can “find” it in relatively simple systems. Then he concludes that the simple systems must be magic since he “found” cognition in them!
colewd,
But you’re not going to get anywhere with jello.
keiths,
It’s quite happy where it is.
My fridge magnets ‘want’ to stick to the fridge – except when I knock ’em off, and then they ‘want’ to fall to the ground – a ground that my body wants to stick to as well. My desire in that regard is proportional to the product of my mass and the earth’s. I wanted it a bit more a couple of months ago, but lost a few pounds over the summer.
Mung,
Can we have a show of hands on that? Anyway, even dogma can be coherent.
And has he heard of a thermostat?
Another IDiot trying to conjure magic through the misuse of words.
Glen Davidson
Let’s be fair here: Mung took some effort to find somebody who fell in the evolutionist camp:
That being said, I agree that his ideas are not very persuasive.
So he’s, uh, not coming out in favor of Intelligent Design Theory. What’s that supposed to mean? And how does one distort his rambling nonsense?
How is he an evolutionist, with cognition and intentionality preceding cellular life? Behe’s something of an “evolutionist,” if you’re willing to throw in strategic magical poofs that somehow fail to think beyond evolutionary lineages. Is he not IDist, since he just sort of throws observable “mechanisms” in with magic, seeming not to care about the difference?
I don’t concern myself especially with his disclaimers. He’s doing everything he can to use his biases to pretend that the science is inadequate (could be, but not because of his conflations), sans any sort of useful insight coming out of his prejudices. I don’t see any reason for him to avoid the ID label other than the fact that it has a well-deserved reputation as pseudoscience. He wants to be considered better than that. If he wants to be seen as better than that, perhaps he should be better than that.
Glen Davidson
He seems to plough a similar furrow to Denis Noble, of whom the absent Lizzie is a fan.
It’s always odd to see gene-centrism portrayed as ‘Darwinian’ – Darwin with his pre-Mendelian ideas on where variation came from.
Yes, somehow “Darwinism” is whatever bias the teaching of evolutionary theory took (due to limitations in technique) when they were learning.
They thought neo-darwinism was the culmination of “darwinism”?
Glen Davidson
Tom English,
I have heard about it and watched the trailer. I don’t know what type of following these guys have.
Allan Miller,
True, as long as it has tight consistent definitions that describe it.
This is true.
No, silly person, that is not correct. Please go back and review what has been posted.
Please stop making things up. It makes it look like you’re not really interested in reasonable discourse. Unless that’s your goal.
phoodoo: Its useful for every person who wants to cling to atheism. Because without it, you have nothing. So for sure its useful. And for sure its not true.
Every person who wants to cling to that old time religion has to defeat evolution because otherwise God didn’t do it.