18.11.09

Wilber on Darwinism

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:29 pm by nemo

Here’s a short bit on Darwinism by Wilber, with surrounding quotes from various people.
Wilber probably didn’t help himself by citing Behe, but to charge him with no understanding Darwinism is ridiculous.
The issue of half a wing is or is not fair in this instance, but Darwinists are incapable of grasping that they have a problem with the evolution of complexity.

Dr. Lane—who has taught Darwinian evolution at a universi¬ty level—then (1996) pertinently assessed Wilber’s apparent com¬prehension of evolutionary biology:
Wilber does not seem to understand that the processes of evolution are blind. He wants to have it “open-eyed” as if natural selection all of sudden wakes up when it hears that a “wing has been formed” (better start chugging) or that an “eye has been completed” (let’s fine tune now). Natural selec¬tion does not “start” when the eye is formed; it works all along without any conscious intention whatsoever.
Not to sound like a groggy professor, but if Wilber turned in [his written ideas] to me as a college student trying to explain the current view of evolutionary theory, I would give him an “F” and ask to see him in my office…. Wilber has misrepresented the fundamentals of natural selection. More¬over, his presentation of how evolution is viewed today is so skewed that Wilber has more in common with creationists than evolutionists, even though he is claiming to present the evolutionists’ current view….
What makes Wilber’s remarks on evolution so egregious is … that he so maligns and misrepresents the current state of evolutionary biology, suggesting that he is somehow on top of what is currently going on in the field.
And Wilber does it by exaggeration, by false statements, and by rhetoric license.

And how have Wilber and his entourage reacted to such emi¬nently valid points? As Jack Crittenden—who used to co-edit the Re Vision journal with Wilber—put it (in Integral, 2004):
Wilber has not been believably criticized for misunderstand¬ing or misrepresenting any of the fields of knowledge that he includes [in his four-quadrant “Theory of Everything”].
That statement, of course, has been false since at least 1996, given Lane’s wonderful work and the fact that Wilber’s “Theory of Everything” most certainly includes basic evolution.
In May of 2005, Wilber offered a rather hasty defense of his documented misrepresentations and arguable misunderstandings of high-school-level evolution theory. From the Integral Naked web forum, via the Vomiting Confetti blog:
Folks, give me a break on this one. I have a Master’s degree in biochemistry, and a Ph.D. minus thesis in biochemistry and biophysics, with specialization in the mechanism of the visual process. I did my thesis on the photoisomerization of rhodopsin in bovine rod outer segments. I know evolutionary theory inside out, including the works of Dawkins et al…. In¬stead of a religious preacher like Dawkins, start with some¬thing like Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemi¬cal Challenge to Evolution. And then guess what? Neo-Dar¬winian theory can’t explain shit. Deal with it….
The problem is that creation scientists—who are almost entirely Christians—after having convincingly demonstrated that neo-Darwinian theory has loopholes large enough to drive several Hummers through—then try to prove that Je¬hovah is in one of the Hummers….
But all that this [“failure” of neo-Darwinian theory] really proves, in my opinion, is that there is an Eros to the Kosmos, an Eros that scientific evolutionary theory as it is simply cannot explain. But overall integral theory doesn’t hang on that particular issue. If physicalistic, materialistic, reductionistic forces turn out to give an adequate explana¬tion to the extraordinary diversity of evolutionary unfolding, then fine, that is what we will include in integral theory. And if not, not. But so far, the “nots” have it by a stagger¬ingly huge margin, and scientists when they are not brag¬ging to the world, whisper this to themselves every single day of their lives.

None of the above, however, alters the fact that Wilber has completely misrepresented the truth that half-wings do exist, and have been documented as existing since Darwin’s own Origin of Species. That has nothing to do with any (excusable) popularizing of Wilber’s theories on his own part. Rather, it is simply a gross and brutally dishonest misrepresentation of basic facts by him, to suit his own “integral” purposes. That is true independent of whether or not kw understands how evolution works.

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