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By SteveP, on August 29th, 2011
So here is the whole thing. I sent his off for review last week and had restructured it so completely that posting in the sensible pieces based on what went before was impossible. So this is the whole shebang. When you run across sections you have read before you can just skim and move on. This is very long for a post. Sorry.
For those who don’t want to read this long, long paper in a nutshell the argument is:
A) Life has evolved in a completely Darwinian fashion.
B) Even so their are strategies that evolution has stumbled upon over and over like the move to individuality and sociality which produces more individuation at higher levels. Other’s include the emergence of life imbedded in a context, changes the design space upon which it rests through influencing and restructuring that space in a constant back and forth between life and that design space. The result in genuine novelty.
C) Bergson, a French philosopher of the early 20th century, noticed that there were creative tendencies in evolution that life uses again and again despite the non-teleological direction of evolutionary change.
D) This has implications for theology:
1. The creation is ongoing.
2. That the creation is unique, unpredicted, and surprising and worthy of preservation and protection. Life is not a set of predefined necessary forms.
3. That emergence means that the universe is open ended and that surprises await in what evolves.
For: What Is Life? Theology, Science, and Philosophy Conference
Krakow, Poland June 2011
Introduction
Biology has something relevant to say to theology and visa-versa (Cunningham 2010), and as a biologist I would like to hone in on some aspects of life that may gesture to perspectives that cross disciplinary lines. In particular I would like to draw on the work of Henri Bergson, long ignored in biology. However, he is growing in relevance as problems in understanding what life is and how it enfolds in an emergent universe become more pressing and more perplexing. Continue reading Life as Emergent Agential Systems: Tendencies Without Teleology
By SteveP, on August 23rd, 2011
Myself, my longtime friend, BYU colleague and mentor, Duane Jeffery, and my buddy the always entertaining James McLachlan, conviene with the amazing Dan Wotherspoon for nearly a couple of hours discussion and commentary on the LDS Church and its historical and contemporary relationship with Evolution.
Click here to go to the Mormon Matters Podcast . . . → Read More: Mormons and Evolution
By SteveP, on August 14th, 2011
My talk at the Science and Religion Conference held in Krakow Poland, “What is Life? Theology, Science, and Philosophy” continued (Part I is found here) . . .
Life’s processes are often mischaracterized as a simple reductive scheme that misses some of life’s most astonishing features. Bergson criticized this as finalism in which the whole was given. This ‘whole’ can be seen in Philosopher Daniel Dennett idea of a design space. He uses it to argue for a deterministic universe, but the idea is that there are only so many possible combinations of DNA that produce viable ‘creatures.’ From a given starting point, the unfolding of different life forms, must wander around on this space, driven by local selection regimes, but the set is finite, and the steps must be small ones. Richard Dawkins uses the same notion in his view of ‘climbing mount improbable’ in which he demonstrates how evolution can completely explain the designed complexity of life on earth. They are right that evolution completely explains complexity, but the question that deserves some consideration is can we ask where the design space comes from? Of course that is in principle unanswerable from a scientific perspective.
Continue reading Mormonism and Evolution, Life as Emergent Agential Systems: My Presentation at the Krakow Theology Conference Part II
By SteveP, on July 17th, 2011
 Where have I been? It’s been a while so I suppose some explanation is in order. I’ve been attending meetings! First I presented a paper at a Science and Religion Conference held in Krakow Poland, called “What is Life? Theology, Science, and Philosophy.” It was a theology meeting exploring questions about ‘Life’ from multiple religious perspectives. It was a blast hobnobbing with priests, monks, Jewish thinkers, Catholic theologians, and most fun of all, a stunningly bright contingent of LDS thinkers including Jacob Baker, Jim Faulconer, Ralph Handcock, Adam Miller, Joseph Spencer, and Justin White. I don’t think I’ve had more fun since I was a teenager (Which fun included a Basia Bulat concert in a small cafe in Krakow). Continue reading Mormonism and Evolution, Life as Emergent Agential Systems, and a Basia Bulat Concert
By SteveP, on April 29th, 2011
Dear Steve,
I love that you are a Mormon Scientist. I have a question. I’ve decided to become an Intelligent Design scientist. I was wondering if you could give me some advice on how to get started? I’m really committed to this and ready to devote great resources (my family is independently wealthy) and the rest of my life to the cause. However, I can’t seem to find out exactly what I should do to proceed? Can you help? I set up my laboratory and I’m ready to start. I’ve got test tubes, DNA sequencer, all the latest equipment, but the Discovery Institute’s website seems not to have any practical advice on what to do at this point.
Yours Faithfully,
Lost in confusion.
Continue reading Dear Steve: I’m ready to do Intelligent Design research!
By SteveP, on March 27th, 2011
It is my pleasure to introduce our guest blogger Dusty Rhoads! Dusty Rhoads is a Brigham Young University graduate, a herpetologist, and is the author of the book, The Complete Suboc (ECO Herpetological Publishing, 2008), which covers all North American ratsnake species west of the Pecos River. Dusty is currently pursuing his PhD in Biology at Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) studying the evolution, ecology, and conservation of reptiles and amphibians.
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“Shouts would then pass from camp to camp, “Khabar dar, bhaieon, shaitan ata!” (“Beware, brothers, the devil is coming!”), but the warning cries would prove of no avail, and sooner or later agonizing shrieks would break the silence, and another man would be missing from roll-call next morning.”
– from The Man-Eaters of Tsavo (JH Patterson, 1907)
Prologue
In March, 1898, two male African Lions (Panthera leo) with an unsavory penchant for man-flesh terrorized the workers of the Uganda Railway camped in Tsavo, Kenya and brought the construction of the railroad to a halt for nearly a month. Continue reading Our Relationship With Serpents: Guest Post by Dusty Rhoads
By SteveP, on March 19th, 2011
Let’s think about Creationists (and let you remind you that by creationist I mean those who demand a literal reading of the scriptures as scientific texts–all the LDS members of my Biology Department at BYU believe evolution is the way life on earth emerged, and the way the human body was formed, yet believe in a Creator. However, literalist creationism, where it exists in Mormonism, is a leak from sources other than the Restoration that misunderstands the scriptures’ purpose. More on that in what follows.) Creationists love to talk about ‘macroevolution’ as if it was some mysterious magical thing that is problematic for evolutionary biology—science’s dirty little secret we don’t want you to know about. Continue reading Macroevolution and the argument from ignorance
By SteveP, on February 16th, 2011
This is a repost from bycommonconsent.com, July 2009. I’ve got something coming that requires this context, so rather than link to it (which no one will read), I’m going repost in its fullness. There are some fundamental misunderstandings by the science attackers (and make no mistake an attack on evolution is an attack on science as such). What’s at stake is the rational inquiry that has driven the successful scientific advances of the last few centuries. But these new perspectives can be hard to contextualize. This can be devastating. It requires new ways of thinking. Sometimes, when one of our youth enters the university to study the modern life sciences, and some well meaning, but basically biologically uniformed, person throws up strings of out of context quotes from general authorities to attack the solid and well-founded life sciences, they give the impression that the student must choose between the gospel and science. Because these new students have not developed the resources to handle such logically and spiritually flawed approaches, they wander away. Some never to return. People who conflate the role of science and religion do immense damage to both faith and science. Let’s start here and talk about what it takes to sometimes reorient in a new world in which a fundamental restructuring of simplistic creationist literalism is necessary.
I’ve been thinking about evolution of late. Not so much about evolution as such, but about people’s resistance to it. I’ve been thinking about the fear that some experience as they face the prospects that a new scientific age is bringing to an end their way of seeing the universe. The simple creationism of a Harry Potter-like God that was appropriate in the Seventeenth Century, and which we borrowed from the Greeks, is giving way to more complex conceptions and more Mormonism-informed perspectives. Continue reading Plenty Coups and Believing in Evolution (repost from BCC)
By SteveP, on February 8th, 2011
It always seems surprising when I hear LDS people arguing for the Discovery Institute’s fundamentalist evangelical campaign of Intelligent Design as if there were some science behind the idea. ID was exposed long ago as a backdoor attempt to get creationism taught in the schools. This was made abundantly clear in the Dover Trial, in which ID was put under the microscope and found to be a fuzz ball rather than a living organism—by a conservative Christian judge nonetheless. It’s an idea without a modicum of scientific merit. There are no scientific institutes, programs or organizations that recognize it as a science. Still, myths persist. Here are a few. Continue reading Intelligent Design: snake-oil science cries ‘whaa whaa whaa’
By , on January 20th, 2011
Check out my post at fMh for Manuary!
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