At 09:01 AM 1/6/00 +0100, Stein Arild Stromme wrote:
>Friends,
>
>I don't have access to Behe's "Darwin's black box", but perhaps
>someone around the ASA list can answer a quick question: Does Behe
>disagree with the standard theory of common descent of all life forms?
>I'm aware of the concept of ID, but my question is rather what
>conclusions Behe himself draws in his book. And what does the "black
>box" refer to?
Here is what Behe says about evolution:
Many people think that questioning Darwinian evolution must be equivalent
to espousing creationism. As commonly understood, creationism involves
belief in an earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an
interpretation of the Bible that is still very popular. For the record, I
have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that
physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all
organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no
particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues
who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary
framework, and I think that evolutinoary biologists have contributed
enormously to our understanding of the world. Although Darwin's
mechanism--natural selection working on variation--might explain many
things, however, I do not believe it explains molecular life. I also do not
think it surprising that the new science of the very small might change the
way we view the less small." ~ Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box, (New
York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 7
As to the term Black Box Behe says,
"Black box is a whimsical term for a device that does something but whose
inner workings are mysterious--sometimes because the workings can't be
seen, and soemtimes because they just aren't comprehensible." p. 6
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
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