SocraticGadfly: A couple of further points about Robert Wright and design issues in evolution

October 09, 2004

A couple of further points about Robert Wright and design issues in evolution

First, in his Beliefnet post on his discussion with Dan Dennett, Wright claims near the bottom of the last page.that he’s not an Intelligent Design pusher of the William Dembski stripe.

“I’m just saying that natural selection, though able to do all the work of designing organisms, may itself be a product of design,” he states.

But for my money, that’s just taking the old “personal designer” issue and moving the “regress cutoff point” back one step. If Wright believes in the possibility of an intelligent designer having started up a neo-Darwinian framework with some intentiaonlity, then he’s an intelligent designer. To distinguish him from Dembski, I’ll keep “intelligent design” in lowercase when talking about his point of view. But that’s all.

Second, I believe his analogy between the Darwinian evolution of life (let alone the physical evolution the universe) and embryogenesis of an individual human being is, to be charitable, not very strong.

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