Evolution
Intelligent Design
Nature’s Primal Patterns: Michael Denton’s “pre-Darwinian” View
Center for Science & Culture senior fellow Michael Denton came through Seattle and Josh Youngkin and I had the opportunity to chat with him about his anti-Darwinism, “a throwback to the typologists of the 19th century” to whom Stephen Jay Gould paid startling tribute in his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. You’ve got to listen to this.
It’s Dr. Denton’s concise and superbly clear explanation of his challenge to Darwinian theory based on the observation of primal patterns in nature. He speaks about body plans and the way — as in, for example, insects — they persist precisely intact over hundreds of millions of years despite having no evident adaptive purpose. As one predecessor, he cites Louis Agassiz who “thought that these patterns were ideas in the mind of God, which is very Platonic.”