Well, to be clear, though I am a theist, I'm not arguing for creationism (far less young earth creationism). No amount of science, information science or otherwise, is going to prove or disprove creationism. Science, as well as religion, runs into the problem of infinite regress:
Turtles all the way down - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Science is based on philosophical and methodological materialism (not that that is a
bad thing, you understand), and, by definition, cannot answer metaphysical questions. That, of course, doesn't keep some zealots from crossing the line into metaphysics, but you basically can't get there from here, IMO.
It goes without saying that scientific theories are provisional, including epigenetic adaptation theory, and will give way in time to more comprehensive theories. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science moves forward when the old guys die off.
The salient point here is the fact that even after the Human Genome Project rendered genetic determinism an "inoperable term" (sorry, couldn't resist that), the old guard scientists still cling to it, shades of Kuhn. Epigenetic theory is heretical still--just ask Firefox.
So, if most of the scientific community clings to genetic determinism, and you can't get enough information from genetic determinism to make, say, a lung, then the people who advocate factoring in
process have a point. And so do the creationists.
We can't just move the goalposts and say, "Oh, yeah, we always factored in process," because we didn't and we mostly still don't.
So Freeman Dyson, Stuart Kaufman, Candace Pert, Mark Baldwin, Rupert Sheldrake, Matt Ridley, Mae-Wan Ho, Stephen Jay Gould, Bruce Lipton, etc., are the exceptions right now.
Quote:
A New Paradigm for Life Beyond genetic determinism
Richard Strohman, Berkeley, California
Most observers commenting on the sequencing of the human genome, after their shock and surprise, fell back to genetic determinism. One exception was the distinguished Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote in the New York Times:
"The collapse of the one gene for one protein, and one direction for causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of [genetic] reductionism for the complex system we call cell biology."
Article: A New Paradigm for Life |
Quote:
By Michael: Yesterday 07:33 PM
Epigenetics, in one sense, is a return to metabolism and might be a union between the two.
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Quote:
In short, genetics alone does not tell us who we are, or who we can be. While, as Gould says, the reductionist theory of genetics has collapsed, the dynamic-epigenetic point of view retains genetics as part of a new paradigm for life, one that has striking implications for the future of the life sciences.
Article: A New Paradigm for Life |
'Neo-Darwin' is rolling over in his grave, and Lamarck is jumping up and down.
As the above article asks:
Where is the programme for life? Quote:
One comes to the startling discovery that the coherent organism is in a very real sense completely free. Nothing is in control, and yet everything is in control.
Thus, it is the failure to transcend the mechanistic framework that makes people persist in enquiring which parts are in control, or issuing instructions....
--Mae-Wan Ho
Selected Works of Dr. Mae-Wan Ho |