![]() Denton is not a creationist, but a structuralist. ![]() “Biologist Michael Denton has written a devastating critique of Darwinian evolution. Flannery, Professor and Assistant Dean for Special and Historical Collections, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and author of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life It is a rare and powerful combination that demands careful reading.” Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis is really two books in one: an insightful and fearless historical analysis on the one hand, and a provocative manifesto for a ‘new’ biology on the other. “In this book Michael Denton moves adroitly from the history of ideas to scientific explanation. His affirmation of common descent with modification also demonstrates that well-founded doubts concerning the capabilities of the neo-Darwinian mechanism cannot be easily dismissed as anti-evolution propaganda, but should rather be welcomed even by neo-Darwinists as heuristically fruitful.” His arguments convincingly suggest that modern biology prematurely dispensed with the notions of typology, essentialism, structuralism, and laws of biological form as promising alternative approaches to the origin of biological complexity and diversity. “Based on a great variety of indisputable facts from biology and paleontology, Michael Denton presents in his new book a highly competent and very thoughtful critique of the neo-Darwinian paradigm. Michael Behe, PhD, Professor of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University, and author of Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution Not only hasn’t Darwinism overcome its challenges, severe new problems have made the crisis much worse.” Now thirty years after his groundbreaking book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton calls their bluff. In ten or twenty years science will surely show their theory is correct, they say. “Darwinists often deflect trenchant criticisms by kicking the can down the road. Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology, University of Warwick, UK, and author of Science vs. Denton is consistently clear and scrupulous about how the evidence bears on neo-Darwinism vis-à-vis what might be called his ‘neo-Owenism.’ All told, Evolution is the one book that I would recommend to any student or lay person who wants to think in positive, scientific terms out of Darwin’s black box.” This proposed new paradigm is founded on the idea of discrete biological forms, or ‘types,’ which have the standing of natural laws. But the book’s real triumph is to frame this criticism in terms of an alternative paradigm, one indebted to Darwin’s great rival Richard Owen. “Of all the books that have been critical of Darwinian evolution in recent years, Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis stands out for doing more than simply compiling the full range of evidence-from cosmology through all of biology to the origins of human language-that goes against a blind, incrementalist view of the development of life. Praise for Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis Published in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015960652īISAC: SCI027000 SCIENCE / Life Sciences / EvolutionīISAC: SCI008000 SCIENCE / Life Sciences/ Biology ![]() Previous books include Signature of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell and Debating Darwin’s Doubt, edited by David Klinghoffer The Myth of Junk DNA by Jonathan Wells and Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life by Michael Flannery.ģ54 pages, 6 x 9 x 0.74 in. This book is part of a series published by the Center for Science & Culture at Discovery Institute in Seattle. In addition, Denton makes a provocative new argument about the pervasiveness of nonadaptive order throughout biology, order that cannot be explained by the Darwinian mechanism.Ĭopyright © 2016 by Discovery Institute. He argues that there remains “an irresistible consilience of evidence for rejecting Darwinian cumulative selection as the major driving force of evolution.” From the origin of life to the origin of human language, the great divisions in the natural order are still as profound as ever, and they are still unsupported by the series of adaptive transitional forms predicted by Darwin. More than thirty years after his landmark book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), biologist Michael Denton revisits his earlier thesis about the inability of Darwinian evolution to explain the history of life.
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