Re: Ted Steele and Lamarck

From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Jun 13 2003 - 23:56:01 MDT

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    At 01:24 AM 6/14/03 -0400, Rafal wrote:

    >Apparently, Steele doesn't give a shred of experimental evidence in favor of
    >his theory, and embarrassingly, supports creationism.

    Not quite. The closing pages of the book state:

    `The short answer is that "divine purpose" or "final causes" are outside
    the scope of scientific work' (220). Then there's some waffle about
    Dawkins. and a comment on whether the universe might be modeled as a sim,
    in which case: `In our view the only useful concept would be one of
    "anticipatory purpose" or "genetic responsibility"--scientific knowledge
    together with ethical and moral attitudes and lifestyle choice *may* impact
    on our future genetic endowment' (221).

    As for experimental evidence: the TV program claimed recent work has been
    published or at least done along those lines, although in several cases it
    was cut short because the funding universities heard what was being done in
    their labs and shut down the money with a shudder of horror. Well, why
    don't they run at once to the Billy Bob Revivalist University and get it
    done on the richly padded checkbooks of the `intelligent design' believers?
    Beats me. Still, to repeat, most of the work by Steele and his
    collaborators is on retrogenes, `mutatorsomes' and the immune system, and I
    get the impression that some of what was once shockingly heretical in their
    claims is now taken for granted.

    Damien Broderick



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