Gary Collins wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>Apologies if this has been posted before. I am in the process of
>cathcing up on my reading of SciAm - for some reason a few issues
>arrived very late and very close together - and the following review
>caught my eye:
>"The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origins of Language.
>John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary. Oxford University Press, New
>York,1999 ($25).
>"Maynard Smith and Szathmary are intrigued by the complexity of
>organisms. "The more we know about them-their biochemistry, their
>anatomy, their behaviour-the more astonishing are the detailed
>adaptations that we discover. How could all this complexity have
>arisen?" Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection cannot alone
>account for it; that theory predicts only that organisms will get better
>at surviving and reproducing in their current environment, not that they
>will become more complex. The answer, according to the authors, is that
>organisms increase in complexity as a result of "a small number of major
>changes in the way in which information is stored, transmitted, and
>translated." Maynard Smith (emeritus professor of biology at the
>University of Sussex) and Szathmary (at the Institute for Advanced Study
>in Budapest) call these changes "the major transitions" and cite eight
>of them in evolutionary history, beginning with replicating molecules
>and ending-at least for now-with the development of human language. In
>explaining the transitions to a general readership, the authors provide
>a clear-eyed review of a large part of modern biology."
>"Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection cannot alone
>account for it;"
That is precisely what most critics of Darwinism, including many
"creationists" have
been saying. I wonder if Maynard Smith and Szathmary are eminent
enough for those people who trust eminent authorities to form their opinions
for them?
Bertvan