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