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A New TheoryDarwin's theory of natural selection was conceived before the science of genetics was mainstream, and any new theory of evolution must include modern molecular data. The new data from molecular genetics has again unseated man from his self-appointed position as the center of the universe. Three hundred and fifty years after Galileo maintained that the sun does not revolve around the earth, the molecular data show that humans are not the culmination of a "great chain of being" but are made of the same genes and proteins as ants and bacteria. One of the most exciting and difficult inquiries of our time is to find the programs that tell our genes when to turn on and off, for this is a large part of the difference between species. This web site presents a new theory to explain the origin of species, a specific scientific theory called "macrodevelopment". The theory was introduced by Dr. Robert DeHaan at the 1995 meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation in a poster presentation entitled "The Cambrian Explosion". The "Intelligent Design" movement takes a wrong turn.It is reasonable to respond to the materialist philosophy of certain prominent evolutionists (Gould, Dawkins) by insisting on design. But to say that God designed some of creation, (e.g. living things) and not other features of the universe that we observe (chance, tornados, chaos) is to point to the wrong designer. Chance is an undeniable feature of the created universe. Your parents, no doubt, met by chance, and yet God knew you before the earth was formed. Chance happens. The plethora of papers that pit "Design" vs "Chance" therefore contain defective philosophy and are notably void of any specific theory that displaces the well-known theory of neo-darwinism. Rather than choose between chance and design, both of which cannot be denied, we should be looking for the best theory that fits the physical evidence. “Intelligent Design” does not offer a theory. Neo-darwinism is bad scienceThe modern theory of evolution is a synthesis of four basic ideas which are:
The theory of macrodevelopment agrees that life on earth has changed and that organisms are interrelated. But it appears that natural selection working on random mutations is incompetent to explain the data contained in the fossil record, and the current biosphere. A focus of intelligent design proponents is the appearance of life on the earth, not because an explanation that followed the laws of nature would imply the lack of an intelligent designer, but because explanations that involve only the known laws of nature do not explain the data. In short, neo-darwinism is bad science, and any explanation that invokes only the known laws of nature appear doomed to fail. The appeal of neo-darwinism is not that it explains the data, but because it is the only game in town for a purely naturalistic explanation for how life forms appeared. And for those who are running away from the Almighty, this is a powerful appeal, indeed. I predict that the Intelligent Design movement will establish the following:
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