>Terry Gray wrote:
>
>>I haven't been following this thread closely (too much to do), but this one
>>caught my eye. We had this discussion about the "reductionistic fantasy
>>about the role of DNA" about a year ago. Many more wholistic thinking
>>biologists, which includes most developmental biologists and evolutionary
>>biologists (and not genecists or biochemists), do not have this
>>reductionistic fantasy about the role of DNA. The very people that David
>>cited would be my list--the paper by Gilbert from Cell is a marvelous
>>overview. Another pair of recent books is Goodwin's *How the Leopard
>>Changed Its Spots* and Cohen and Stewart's *The Collapse of Chaos*. Jon
>>Wells, who used to contribute to this group, has a nice article on this
>>subject. I can't find the reference, perhaps Paul Nelson can list it for
>>us.
>
>Jon Wells, "The History and Limits of Genetic Engineering," _International
>Journal on the Unity of the Sciences_ 5 (1992): 137-50.
>
>>It should be stated that this in no way necessarily lends support to the ID
>>agenda. A denial of reductionism does not imply supernatural intervention.
>
>You're right, it doesn't. Kauffman and Goodwin haven't come knocking at
>the ID door, not by a long shot. They're aren't even in the neighborhood.
>
>On the other hand, consider the following:
>
> Of all the problems with the hypothesis that life started as nude
> replicating RNA molecules, the one I find most insurmountable is the
> one most rarely talked about: all living things seem to have a
> minimal complexity below which it is impossible to go. ... Why is
> there this minimal complexity? Why can't a system simpler than
> pleuromona [a bacterium] be alive?
>
>[S. Kauffman, _At Home in the Universe_, 1995, p. 42]
>
>This notion, and Behe's idea of irreducible complexity, are kissing cousins.
>Brother and sister, even. The advantage Mike has, however, is we know about
>top-down causation. We do it all the time. This post to the reflector for
>instance was caused, top-down, by me, sitting at a computer in the Origins &
>Design editorial office in Evanston, IL. (Stop by if you're in town.)
>
>Self-organization, however...
>
>Paul Nelson
Hi Paul,
I owe you a couple of responses to private email.
I'd be interested in what fills in your ellipsis. Obviously, in modern
organisms top-down (downward) causation is functioning. The whole system
imposes itself on the components. Nobody, except the most extreme
reductionists, contest this.
But, in my opinion, this tells us absolutely nothing about the origination
of the whole in the first place. It is possible for wholes to originate
WITHOUT downward causation. Micelles, membranes and liposomes emerge
spontaneously from aqueous solutions of bipolar molecules with the latter
evidencing the emergent property of having an inside and an outside, which
is a property of the whole and not of the component material. Such a thing
is irreducibly complex in the in/out property. In-ness and out-ness
disappears without the whole structure being intact. A common fallacy
among special creationists and apparently design theorists is to confuse
the modern manifestation of a thing with the steps (even if herky-jerky by
virtue of emergent properties) that may have led to its formation.
I'm quick to say that I don't have the detailed answers that Paul or Mike
Behe are going to ask me for. And they will probably accuse me of solving
difficult problems by appealing to a good imagination. But just because
they can't imagine a solution doesn't mean that I can't nor that one is not
possible. Most remarkable gains in science have come by way of imagining
the unimaginable. At the same time I do think that the self-organization
school offers tremendous promise, which people like Phil Johnson and Mike
Behe pooh-pooh as the fantasizing of the mathematicians and computer
scientists.
It's only going to take one clear success in what I consider at present to
be a very promising research program to take to the trash-heap all of their
nay-saying. Frankly, I don't understand why we spend so much time arguing
about this rather than to be about the business to proposing and testing
our hypotheses. The same problems that the ID people are pointing to are
well-recognized by the complexity folks. The ID want to simply state that
God (or some intelligent agent) did it (which he did) whereas the
complexity people want to leave room for some secondary causal explanation
which is accessible to the human understanding. Perhaps there is no such
secondary causal explanation (in that respect I'm not at all convinced that
ID is an illegitimate enterprise), but if there is such an explanation,
we're not going to find it by not looking for it.
If the answer to the question is rooted in religious claims, then lets be
addressing religious claims and unwarranted extrapolations of scientific
theories. I hope, although I'm still not convinced that it's true, that we
all believe that even if we have a full-blown scientific explanation of
things (which we don't) that it is an unwarranted extrapolation, even of
that, to claim that there is no God or no need for God.
TG
_____________________________________________________________
Terry M. Gray, Ph.D. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Calvin College 3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 40546
Office: (616) 957-7187 FAX: (616) 957-6501
Email: grayt@calvin.edu http://www.calvin.edu/~grayt
*This mission critical message was written on a Macintosh with Eudora Pro*
A special message for Macintosh naysayers:
http://www.macworld.com/pages/july.96/Column.2204.html