Thursday, August 2, 2012

Who's the Science Stopper: Introduction

It has long been a claim of Darwinism that, as Theodosius Dobzhansky so bluntly put it in the title of his essay, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution".  Obviously there are many people who disagree with this (here's one organization that's a particular favorite of mine devoted to explaining biology without the "light" of evolution) and I don't feel inclined to discus the topic of how Biology can be explained without evolution.  Why then have I opened with this quote?  Frankly, because it's what got me thinking about the topic I now wish to embark on.  Not only is Biology also explained by other theories, and I think often better, there are some times when Darwinian predictions lead Biologists down the wrong track.  I'll get into the specifics later, but the fact is that there a number of times when Darwinian thinking has been a science stopper.  Don't get me wrong, many opposing views have done the same, but I think it is becoming increasingly clear that Darwinism is not only not immune to science-stopping, it is severely infected by it.  In light of this, I hope to outline a few classic examples of Darwinian-based assumptions that turned out to be science-stoppers.

First, however, I want to be very clear on something.  This series of posts are not intended to be taken as an argument against evolution or for my personal beliefs on biological or astronomical origins.  These posts are simply intended to inform the reader of facts that he may not have been aware of and offer analysis that could be new as well.  If you want good arguments for my personal view or against Neo-Darwinism, just go to the site linked above (and here too, for that matter) and browse around.  All I intend to do here is explore the idea that there may be times and places where Darwinism can act as a science stopper, just as the Church and other paradigms have acted as science-stoppers, as in the case of the geocentric model of the universe.  I leave it to you to decide whether this is merely a fluke and unavoidable human error, or sign of a real deficiency in the Darwinian Paradigm.

(By the way, you may not want to hold your breadth while waiting for the following posts.  I'll be lucky if I get them all in before the end of summer.  If you don't want to miss the up-coming posts you can subscribe to my blog via email at the bottom of the page.)

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