James P. Hogan Catastrophes, Chaos and Convolutions

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that the gods who moved planets and cast thunderbolts couldn't be bribed,
fooled, treated with, or placated in the ways that work with humans. The way
toward eking a more secure and comfortable living out of nature, and
harnessing some of its potencies to more useful things, lay in accepting that
it would continue to be what it was regardless of human desires. Hence, the
way toward understanding it better lay in following the evidence wherever it
led, and seeing what could be made of the situation. Deciding where the
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evidence led required impartial testing, which entailed a struggle with
traditional authority in its role of restricting what might be questioned; but
reason and free inquiry prevailed, and hence grew the inductive-experimental
method of the science that we celebrate today. However, old habits die hard.
Sometimes, accepting where the evidence seems to be leading comes up against
what has become a new dogma of how things have to be, any questioning of which
is impermissible.
I was pleasantly surprised by the positive responses that I received to
Kicking the Sacred Cow
, which looked at a selection of modern-day scientific heresies all but
guaranteed to include something that would upset anybody. One of the topics
that stimulated a lot of interest and requests for where to learn more was the
discussion of Intelligent Design in the section questioning the orthodox
neo-Darwinian account of evolution. The pieces on the subject that I post from
time to time on my Web site draw a respectable portion of the incoming mail
too. The impression I get is that despite the cultural monopoly accorded
evolution by the media, academia, and in the schools, a lot of people feel
instinctively that there's something wrong with it, and that there's more
going on than a doctrine of pure materialism and nothing more acknowledges.
In a way this mirrors my own experience. Along with the majority of people
growing up in postwar
England, I accepted the Darwinian picture unquestioningly because the
educational system and popular scientific coverage offered no alternative, and
the authorities that I had been raised to trust assured me that there wasn't
one. The dispute between Hunt and Danchekker in
Inherit the Stars
1 isn't over whether or not the human race evolved but where it happened. And
eleven years later I was still staunchly defending the theory.2But as
recounted in
KTSC
, I later became skeptical about many of the things I
thought I knew. When it came to looking again at evolution, the first doubt to
arise was that natural selection was capable of doing everything it was
supposed to do. And this was the driving engine of the whole process. What
made
TheOrigin of Species such a sensation wasn't the idea of simple things
evolving into more complex things, which had been around for millennia, but
that it offered, for the first time, a mechanism for making it happen that
stemmed from purely natural causes.
This isn't to deny that selection is real and plays its part. Artificial
selection had been familiar enough to plant and animal breeders since long
before Darwin's time and has wrought such feats as producing the entire range
of dog breeds that we see today from an ancestral stock derived from the wolf.
But breeders
also know that selection for a given trait can only be pushed so far before it
reaches a limit beyond which no further improvement is possible, and organisms
become nonviable. Fundamental innovations for which the genetic potential
simply isn't there can never be induced by any amount of perseverance. Indeed,
selection in the wild had been known to naturalists for a long time, but it
was always regarded as a conservative force, keeping organisms true to type by
culling out extremes.
Darwin was aware of this he was a pigeon breeder himself but he attributed
such limits to the restricted scope, and particularly the limited time span,
of the human experience. A natural mechanism for altering the forms of living
things existed, and he saw "no reason why" (a phrase that occurs repeatedly in
Origin
), given enough resources in the form of time and sufficient material to work
on, the principle shouldn't extrapolate indefinitely to account for all of
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nature. In short, from the limited ability that organisms possess for adapting
to changing conditions, Darwin went beyond the evidence in fact, against it,
some would argue to infer an unlimited potential for innovation, capable of
producing anything: a fish from a reptile; a land mammal from a whale; the
whole living world from some primitive common ancestor.
This was where I found myself unconvinced, or uneasy at best. The verifiable
changes that
Origins presented and discussed in detail were all comparatively minor
adaptations of an uncontroversial kind, while the major transitions and
introduction of completely new types that gave the theory its importance were
entirely speculative. But it flowed with the tide of materialism and
naturalism floating the rise of empire and laissez-faire economics that
characterized the times. Again, Darwin and his supporters were aware that the
sweeping generalization they were proposing was not attested to by actual
evidence, and what there was told against it. But they were confident that now
fossil hunters, anatomists, embryologists, and so forth knew what to look for,
it would be forthcoming in abundance. So the faith was pronounced first, based
on an ideology and intellectual appeal, and the facts would be fitted into
place later. Wasn't this, however, exactly what science was supposed to be
getting away from?
For those who might object at this point that the potted notion of science
meticulously gathering facts and then coming up with theories to explain them
is just an idealized caricature, I agree that many fruitful lines of discovery
have developed from somebody's hatching an idea and then going out to the
world in search of evidence to support or disconfirm it. Collecting all the
raw data that the world has to offer would be an impossible task, and some
kind of filtering criterion has to be applied to know what facts to look for.
But ideas at that stage of development are properly termed hypotheses, which
are supposed to be tentatively held, modestly proclaimed, and highly sensitive
to rejection or advancement depending on the findings. This does not describe
the fanfare of academic effervescence and political acclaim that followed
Darwin's publication. This was all the more remarkable when the promised
plethora of confirmatory evidence failed to materialize, and what did turn up
continued obstinately to point the wrong way. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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