>> >Denton, Behe, Berlinski, Dembski, Johnson, Hoyle, Wickramasinge,
Kauffman and Spetner
>>
>>Denton, as I recall is trying to reinvent Platonism. Behe does not
support your position. >>Berlinski and Johnson, I was under the impression
that they are apologists, rhetoriticians. As >>far as I know they don't
base their remarks on data, but on ideology. Spetner's ideas are
>>currently being sliced and diced here on the list. Wickramasinge and
Kauffman I've never >>heard of.
Wickramasinge is a mathematician who is usually teamed up with astronomer
Sir Fred Hoyle.
This would be the Hoyle and Wickramasinge that think that insects might be
as intelligent as humans but are hiding it from us:
"The situation points to one of two possibilities. Either we are dealing
with an overt plan invented by an intelligence considerably higher than our
own, an intelligence which has foreseen all our chemicals an flamethrowers,
or the insects have already experienced selection pressure against
intelligences of at least our level in many other environments elsewhere in
the universe.
There is a curious variant of the first possibility. Could the insects
themselves be the intelligence much higher that our own? We are so
conditioned to thinking that the intelligence of a species can be
exemplified by an individual member that it is hard to asses a situation in
which each individual might show little intelligence, but in which the
combined aggregate of individuals might show much. Yet it is so in our own
brains, where no individual neuron can be said to display intelligence but
in which the aggregate of neurons constitutes exactly what we understand by
intelligence.
The static nature of insect societies goes against this thinking. If an
enormous intelligence inhabits the beehives of the world, we might expect
to see evidence of its presents. But this may again be to endow an
opponent with our own restless characteristics. Perhaps concealment is an
essential tactic. Perhaps the intelligence is static because it
understands the dictum of sagacious lawyers: `When your case is going well,
say nothing." [ _Evolution From Space_ (1981) by Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra
Wickramasinghe, chap. 8 (Insects from Space?) p.127 ]
Frankly I see Hoyle and Wickramasinghe not buying Darwinian evolution as a
plus for Darwinian evolution...
Bye
Troy Britain (Amateur Naturalist)
"It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the `plan of
creation,' `unity of design,' &c., and to think that we give an explanation
when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach
more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the
explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory."
- Charles Darwin.