Evolution: the catch-all explanation

I find one of the most irritating things in much modern scientific writing, or in television 'scientific' programmes is the notion that evolution explains everything. These days if a writer starts to tell me (without any evidence) that something evolved in such and such a way - and particularly if they introduce this without any necessity - I stop reading, or switch off. Evolution has become the catch-all approach to science, and is basically so nonsensical in the way much of it is used that I just can't be bothered to follow these sorts of 'arguments' through. You could say that my own 'bias' is showing here, and that I should 'inform' myself by reading things that I don't agree with. I do, if there's a good reason to do so, but when someone supposedly claims things happened by evolution and does it without anything to back up the statement, I know I'm in the presence of a writer who hasn't really thought through the implications of what they saying. And in case you think that my bias is showing and that I should read things I don't agree with in order to be more informed, check out Dr Cornelius Hunter on the same subject. I quote: ...evolutionists have a seemingly never ending list of mechanisms they use to explain everything in between. Whatever we find in biology, evolutionists say it must have evolved. Their predictions and expectations are often falsified and they have to patch their theory repeatedly. And there is no distinction between a new, fantastic design and a repeated design--both are equiprobable under evolution. If a new, fantastic design appears such as the trilobite eye, then evolutionists ascribe it to natural selection. If similar designs are found in different species, then it is ascribed to common descent. If later cousin species are found to lack the design, then common descent can be dropped as an explanation and the design can be said to have evolved independently. The evolutionary explanation is extremely flexible. More on Cornelius Hunter here.

Heresy!

I couldn't resist picking up the latest copy of New Scientist, a magazine that can be irritatingly dogmatic about scientific matters. But any edition of this particular magazine that has a cover saying, Darwin was wrong needs to be checked out at the very least.
The article in question is actually entitled: Uprooting Darwin's Tree - the tree of life, that is, which, according to author Graham Lawton is no longer one of the iconic concepts of evolution but a figment of our imagination. I wait in hope for the day New Scientist proclaims evolution a figment of our imagination as well, but I may be waiting a while yet.
Let me quote the last couple of paragraphs of this article, which is fairly densely written in terms of DNA and RNA and genes and so on:
[Michael] Rose goes even further. "The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that," he says. "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change." Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says, and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.
If he is right, the tree concept could become biology's equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world. "The tree of life was useful," says [Eric] Bapteste. "It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it's time to move on."

While checking out the address of New Scientist on the Web I discovered that they pretty much put everything in their magazines online - so I could have saved myself the NZ$8 that I just spent to buy the magazine - after all, I only wanted to see what they had to say about Darwin. But the magazine does have a number of other interesting articles and being able to read these online is a bonus.

Recognizing the limitations of our understanding is one of the most important insights from Bohr's complementarity. Perhaps there is no single correct path. Solving the world's problems may require both scientific and religious attitudes — two types of faith, not just one or the other.

From Intelligent Design or Intelligible Design? - It's a matter of faith, by Frederick Grinnell.

(Niels Bohr introduced complementarity in 1927 to account for the failure of classical physics to explain the nature of light.)

Frederick Grinnell is a professor of cell biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas.