This is yet another in a line of PRO-evolution books by highly credible, mainstream biologists who are stepping forward one by one and insisting that The Emperor really does have no clothes.
Turner is not in any way, shape or form opposed to the idea of evolution itself. He’s no creationist. In fact he insists we are obligated to study and understand purpose, just to even make sense of evolution itself. And there are so many mechanisms we need to study.
I recently talked to a grad student who dares not advocate teleology in nature until his career is on safer footing. I have consulted in 300 industries and I have never encountered a field more choked with fear and political correctness than evolutionary biology.
Fortunately it seems more and more scientists are getting away with calling a spade a spade. It’s about time, because this nonsense has been going on far too long. Fodor’s “What Darwin Got Wrong” and James Shapiro’s “Evolution: A View from the 21st Century” were among the first to breach the wall. Suzan Mazur’s books chronicled the schism between old-school Darwinism and evolution experiments by top researchers, nearly 10 years ago. More recently, Denis Noble’s “Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity” has joined the chorus. Systems biology is on the rise.
10-15 years ago, detractors were limited to creationists and Intelligent Design advocates. But today, dissent comes from many eminent scientists with impeccable credentials. Before, scientists risked losing their careers. Today, the strength of the Neo-Darwinians is fading.
The 2016 Evolution meeting at the Royal Society in London was the first time a major conference was entirely devoted to asking whether new mechanisms can be shoe-horned into Neo-Darwinism, or if the theory must be rebuilt from the ground up. The consensus seemed to favor the latter.
Rock-star biologist Carl Woese lamented at how reductionist thinking reduced biology to “become a science of lesser importance, for it had nothing fundamental to tell us about the world.” He described how biology has become shackled by the confines of reductionist physics. He hoped that it will “press forward once more as a fundamental science.”
Enter J. Scott Turner, whose deep work with termites (and many other things) lead him to conclude: “This Darwinian dog don’t hunt.” He, like Noble, is a physiologist, and as such acknowledges that it’s manifestly incoherent to claim that hands only *appear* to have the purpose of grasping, and that hearts only *appear* to have the purpose of hunting, and wings only *appear* to have the purpose of flying.
This dogma of purpose being mere illusion has been used for decades to shame scientists into thinking that IF they think there is purpose in nature, then they really are not scientists after all.
Turner finally came to the conclusion that this is nothing but an arbitrary piece of philosophical dogma, and worse, it sucks the true power out of the science of biology.
I could not agree more. The purposefulness of living things is apparent to any six year old. It is manifest at every level at which you study life. So as in Mao’s China, it takes a great deal of “re-education” for people to unlearn the obvious. After all, how is a Darwinist who says nature only *appears* to be purposeful, being any more honest than a Creationist who says nature only *appears* to be billions of years old?
He explores what Lamarck actually believed and wrote, as opposed to his detractors’ straw-man caricatures (Lamarck is now vindicated after 200 years - yes, acquired traits do pass to offspring); Turner reconsiders the implications of “vitalism” and what is really meant by such a term; he explores components of the cell like the cytoskeleton and its roll in intracellular communication; he considers various origin of life scenarios, concluding that we are studying the problem at entirely the wrong scale.
In banishing purpose from the discussion, he says, “Where we have striven to exclude the ghosts from our machines, we have inadvertently constructed back doors that allow the ghosts to creep right back in.”
The book is extremely well written and congenial. Like Shapiro and Noble, Turner is a gentleman and does not go on a shaming rampage. This book is no rant. Rather, he invites you to really think and decide for yourself.
And like those before him who first cracked the Berlin wall, he carves a middle path between the two extremes. I predict that in 2-5 years, hordes of former prisoners of Neo-Darwinian dogma will make their escape to freedom.
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Top reviews from other countries
I have done the only one point by mistake. The book was fantastic, very oryginal and eruditive. IT gives me much to thinking, especialy phillsophical and of biological system theory. I AM very grateful, that there exist such a forever and się people like professor Turner that goes against the establishment of scientific surroundings. There is the truth that we should wiking for.
Against waterflow of scientific establishment.
Reviewed in Poland on June 6, 2023
