The Rhetoric of Darwinism
Darwin deliberately stressed the reductionistic, physicalist
aspects of his theory in order to eliminate any hint of the involvement of a
designer or a vital force in his explanation of the development of living
things. Rather the rhetoric of Darwinism is of a ‘force’ (selection) acting upon
essentially passive objects considered in isolation (organisms). It is the
rhetoric of physics. And physics has also profoundly influenced molecular
biology; genes are
described as strings of chemicals to which mutations happen. It may be,
however, that the rhetoric of evolution in the next century will be much more
in terms of Kauffman’s work on self-organisation and the development of
complexity, of interdependent organisms exploring together the possibilities of
greater complexity.
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link | Feedback | Contributed by: Dr. Christopher Southgate and Dr. Michael Robert Negus
Source: God, Humanity and the Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999)
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