Denis Noble: Evolution needs replacement, not extension
In The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” Oxford’sDenis Noble explains to Suzan Mazur why our understanding of evolution needs to be replaced, not merely extended:
The reasons I think we’re talking about replacement rather than extension are several. The first is that the exclusion of any form of acquired characteristics being inherited was a central feature of the modern synthesis. IN other words, to exclude any form of inheritance that was non-Mendelian, that was Lamarckian-like, was an essential part of the modern synthesis. What we are now discovering is that there are mechanisms by which some acquired characteristics can be inherited, and inherited robustly. So it;s a bit odd to describe adding something like that to the synthesis (i.e., extending the synthesis). A more honest statement is that the synthesis needs to be replaced.
By “replacement” I don’t mean to say that the mechanism of random change followed by selection does not exist as a possible mechanism. But it becomes one mechanism amongst many others, and those mechanisms must interact. So my argument for saying this is a matter of replacement rather than extension is simply that it was a direct intention of those who formulated the modern synthesis to exclude the inheritance of acquired characteristics. (p. 27)
He goes on to say that the modern synthesis is a “gene-centric” view that has got causality in biology wrong.
Once Darwinism (random change followed by selection) is evaluated on the basis of probability, an entire metaphysic is going to collapse. That’s what Darwin’s followers have fought so hard to prevent.
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