Bertvan
> 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?
Chris
I wonder if you've noticed that no evolutionist for the past thirty or forty
years or so (with a few die-heard exceptions) has claimed that *Darwin's*
theory alone, in its pure form, *did* account for complexity. Perhaps you'd
like to catch up with modern times and modern theory? Darwin's theory does
not *predict* extreme complexity, except in some cases, but it does not
forbid it either. It simply leaves the question open.
I, as a staunch and purely naturalistic evolutionist, have been claiming
this for years, and, in fact, have developed my own list of stages of the
evolution of evolution itself, involving how information is stored and used
in the replication and varying process. But, after everything is said, *all*
of these stages are still results of replication and variation.
Further, natural selection does not account for complexity *at all*. It's
*variation* that accounts for complexity. Selection merely culls out those
organisms that don't work very well in their local environment. Selection
*cannot* produce complexity. It can only work on *existing* organisms, and
it can only work to *reduce* variations, not *produce* them. Natural
selection accounts, instead, for why we don't see vastly *more* variation
than we do, because it eliminates those variations that just don't work, so
we generally don't see them.
It appears that Smith and Szathmary have been reading Dawkins or other
modern evolutionists. Good for them.
--Chris C
Now is the time for all good people to come to.