Friday 6 June 2014

New Challenge to Neo-Darwinism: Scientists Launch New Site Critical of Darwinian Mechanisms

Biology is more complicated than proponents of Darwinian evolution assume. Image courtesy of the National Institutes of Health.



Joel Kontinen


An international group of well-known scientists have launched The Third Way, a new website critical of Darwinian mechanisms. While they do not embrace creation or intelligent design, they are dissatisfied with evolutionary explanations that often rely on “sheer luck”.

The majority of the 17 contributors to the site are university professors and researchers. They include James A. Shapiro, Denis Noble, Eva Jablonka and Eugene Koonin.

They state, among other things:

Neo-Darwinism … has elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems.”

They do not believe that the evidence supports this kind of thinking:

The DNA record does not support the assertion that small random mutations are the main source of new and useful variations. We now know that the many different processes of variation involve well regulated cell action on DNA molecules.”

They go on to say:

Genomes merge, shrink and grow, acquire new DNA components, and modify their structures by well-documented cellular and biochemical processes.”

It seems that the time when Darwinian evolution was the only accepted scientific explanation for all kinds of phenomena is past and gone.

Source:

The Third Way