Again that was a nice assertion. Can you back it up?
In re his total lack of comprehension (note especially that debunking consists of
addressing the points raised in the work being debunked, unlike Berlinski on eye evolution):
Michael Denton - Evolution: A Theory In Crisis:
"Denton attempts to make scientific arguments over minor details in how natural selection proceeds look like the entire fact of natural selection is in question. He distorts Gould and 'punctured equilibrium' theorists to make false claims about the fossil record. ... Also on page 74, Denton makes the inane assertion that since 1859, scientists have only adopted an evolution framework in order to be "fashionable and intellectually respectable". He goes on to misrepresent reality by saying that "there was less need to justify the idea of evolution by reference to the facts". These statements in a book which largely ignores the facts are highly ironic. ... Finally, beginning on page 80, Denton begins to face the music and deal with the empirical evidence he previously stated doesn't exist. ... Denton postulates that unless someone can literally test and watch a process, it can't be considered empirical evidence. Later he accepts plate tectonics and other items which we know happened in the past based on his so called "circumstantial evidence" but he contradictorily won't allow a look at evolution based on similar "circumstantial evidences" ... Beginning on page 100, we get a taste of perhaps Denton's biggest methodological problem. He enjoys using very old sources which have little or no relevance to today's debate. Some of his sources are over 150 years old! They were written even before Darwin had a decent grasp on natural selection. His cites from "The Fossil Record" chapter are almost all from pre-1970 sources--with most of them coming from the 1930s and 1940s. Not only are these dated scientifically, but because of their antiquity they are hard to refer to in order to check for Denton's accuracy in quoting them. ... Again, on page 159, he makes the claim that living missing links are "required by evolution". Evolution by natural selection "requires" just the opposite ... After distorting the evidence to make it look as if none of Darwin's "missing links" have been found, Denton acts surprised on page 161 when some 600 million year old fossils don't turn out to be related to the species of today. He thinks this is somehow negative evidence even though we know that most of yesterday's species are not related to today's."
Review of Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
"Denton seems to harbor much personal confusion about what non-saltational evolution actually is, and it is from this confusion that another one of his erroneous claims against evolution derives. He believes evolution is a random search process, that somehow mutation plus natural selection yields results about as random as macromutation:
quote:
Ultimately, Darwin's theory implied that all evolution had come about by the interactions of two basic processes, random mutation and natural selection, and it meant that the ends arrived at were entirely the result of a succession of chance events. Evolution by natural selection is therefore, in essence, strictly analogous to problem solving by trial and error, and it leads to the immense claim that all the design in the biosphere is ultimately the fortuitous outcome of an entirely blind random process - a giant lottery. (Denton, 1987, p. 43)
"
And those are just the high points. In re his later writings, from
Nature's Destiny: From the impossibility of evolution to the inevitability of evolution: Anti-Evolutionst Michael Denton turns into an 'Evolutionist':
"'Nature's Destiny' is one long argument for the biocentric Fine Tuning of the Universe. In that sense it is a greatly expanded version of the chapter "The Puzzle of Perfection" in his Evolution: a theory in crisis(1986). However the Fine Tuning Argument does not only imply cosmological evolution, but it also implies biological evolution. And that is exactly what his previous book Evolution: A Theory in crisis attacked in the most thorough way. And
biological evolution, that is the common descent of all life, is exactly what he defends now in Nature's Destiny. Not a limited version of evolution. No, complete naturalistic evolution from inorganic materials to the first cell to humans. {emphasis added - JRF} ... Denton presents 'new' evidence for the adequacy of the Darwinian mechanism of evolution (surprise!) and he tries to escape the randomness of the Darwinian evolutionary process by postulating 'directed evolution' (surprise!). ... Taken together with the previous argument, the whole argument eliminates Denton's 'last' obstacle to evolution and so there is 'nothing' with prevents him anymore from acceptance of the fact and mechanism of biological evolution. He could have known in 1986 the theoretical possibility of DNA's capacity, but was blinded by selfconstructed discontinuities in enzymes like Cytochrome-C. ...
What was a challenge to evolution and Darwinism in 1986 is now evidence for directed evolution against a background of inevitable evolution {emphasis in original - JRF} ... I agree to a large extent with Denton's new evolutionary paradigm, but the complete lack of any explicit explanation of what was wrong in 'Evolution: a theory in crisis' is highly unsatisfactory. It certainly is unsatisfactory if one knows that Denton(1986) caused a lot of misunderstandings by non-biologists and other outsiders! Let the reader judge Denton's scientific integrity. To me this is dishonesty. Nature's Destiny could have been the most dramatic and instructive account of a paradigm change, if Denton fully accounted for the change, if Denton explained what was wrong in Evolution: a theory in crisis and why, but he did not."
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