Article 28265 of talk.origins:
From: philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu (Phillip Johnson)
Subject: SWAA Lecture
Date: 18 Jan 1993 16:25:42 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 616
Message-ID: <1jelm6$ejh@agate.berkeley.edu>

This is the text of the plenary session lecture which I gave at
the annual meeting of the Southwestern Anthropological
Association in Berkeley in April, 1992.   It will be published in
a forthcoming issue of the California Anthropologist.  The
lecture refers to an exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences 
Museum in San Francisco -- the "Hard Facts Wall" -- which
was illustrated by two drawings.  These cannot be reproduced
here, but I will mail a copy of the drawings (or the complete
lecture with reference notes) to anyone who sends me a mailing
address.   I have also had to leave the accent off the "e" in P.
Grasse's name.    

The anti-Darwinian evolutionary theory of Grasse provides an
interesting contrast to the orthodox Anglo-American Darwinism
of e.g., Chris Colby's FAQ.      Phillip E. Johnson


                 Darwinism's Rules of Reasoning


     My starting point is a book review which Theodosius
Dobzhansky published in 1975, critiquing Pierre Grasse's book
"The Evolution of Life."  Grasse, an eminent French zoologist,
believed in something which he called "evolution."  So did
Dobzhansky, but when Dobzhansky used that term he meant neo-
Darwinism, evolution propelled by random mutation and guided by
natural selection.  Grasse used the same term to refer to
something very different, a poorly understood process of
transformation in which one general category (like reptiles) gave
rise to another (like mammals), guided by mysterious "internal
factors" which seemed to compel many individual lines of descent
to converge at a new form of life.  Grasse denied emphatically
that mutation and selection have the power to create new complex
organs or body plans, explaining that the intra-species variation
that results from DNA copying errors is mere fluctuation, which
never leads to any important innovation.  Dobzhansky's famous
work with fruitflies was a case in point.  According to Grasse, 

       The genic differences noted between separate
     populations of the same species that are so often
     presented as evidence of ongoing evolution are, above
     all, a case of the adjustment of a population to its
     habitat and of the effects of genetic drift.  The
     fruitfly (drosophila melanogaster), the favorite pet
     insect of the geneticists, whose geographical,
     biotropical, urban, and rural genotypes are now known
     inside out, seems not to have changed since the
     remotest times.

     Grasse insisted that the defining quality of life is the
intelligence encoded in its biochemical systems, an intelligence
that cannot be understood solely in terms of its material
embodiment.  The minerals which form a great cathedral do not
differ essentially from the same materials in the rocks and
quarries of the world; the difference is man's intelligence,
which adapted them for a given purpose.  Similarly,

     Any living being possesses an enormous amount of
     "intelligence," very much more than is necessary to
     build the most magnificent of cathedrals.  Today, this     
     "intelligence" is called information, but it is still
     the same thing.  It is not programmed as in a computer,     
     but rather it is condensed on a molecular scale in the     
     chromosomal DNA or in that of every other organelle in     
     each cell.  This "intelligence" is the sine qua non of     
     life.  Where does it come from?... This is a problem
     that concerns both biologists and philosophers, and, at     
     present, science seems incapable of solving it.... If
     to determine the origin of information in a computer is     
     not a false problem, why should the search for the
     information contained in cellular nuclei be one?

     Grasse argued that the Darwinists who dominate evolutionary
biology have failed, due to their uncompromising commitment to
materialism, to define properly the problem they were trying to
solve.  The real problem of evolution is to account for the
origin of new genetic information, and it is not solved by
providing illustrations of the acknowledged capacity of an
existing genotype to vary within limits.  Darwinists had imposed
upon evolutionary theory the dogmatic proposition that variation
and innovative evolution are the same process, and then had
employed a systematic bias in the interpretation of evidence to
support the dogma.  Here are some representative judgments from
Grasse's introductory chapter:

     Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold,
     often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has
     been created..... Biochemists and biologists who adhere     
     blindly to the Darwinist theory search for results that     
     will be in agreement with their theories.... Assuming
     that the Darwinian hypothesis is correct, they
     interpret fossil data according to it; it is only
     logical that [the data] should confirm it; the premises     
     imply the conclusions.... The deceit is sometimes
     unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing
     to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and
     refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and the falsity     
     of their beliefs.

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