Non-creationist, non-Darwinist, "third way" theories of evolution.
"Children of the Genome"
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- Written by Shaun Johnston Shaun Johnston
- Published: January 29, 2023 January 29, 2023
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At last I've boiled my message down to 40 pages. How life differs from non-life. How evolution works. Mind, creativity, consciousness. The genome, conscious, able to think living creatures into existence. Species as thoughts in a genome's mind. Crazy? Maybe. But everything accounted for. See right sidebar.
No commentsTriadism: accounting for mind evolving
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- Written by Shaun Johnston Shaun Johnston
- Published: December 8, 2022 December 8, 2022
- Hits: 131 131
Don't most of us experience having minds? Yet our school textbooks tell children they originated through purely physical processes (the modern synthesis). Because, I say, writers of those textbooks don't experience mind, well, not minds like ours. In a series of five posts I outline a triadism that can account for mind and consciousness evolving. More...
2 meaning systems compared: Physicalism and Thanatology
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- Written by Shaun Johnston Shaun Johnston
- Published: June 22, 2021 June 22, 2021
- Hits: 1348 1348
Of these two common kinds of meaning, which is primary? I conclude, the latter. So why is evolution confined to the former? More...
Could reductionism survive loss of Darwinism?
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- Written by Shaun Johnston Shaun Johnston
- Published: May 28, 2021 May 28, 2021
- Hits: 895 895
Making natural selection the deciding factor in whether to go with reductionism or dualism is a risky bet. If natural selection turns out not to be the primary mechanism of evolution, I think the loss to science would shift the debate in favor of dualism. Then the field’s wide open. That’s exciting. Counterfactuality, not so much. Review of Chiara Marletto's "The Science of Can and Can't."
New Meaning from the Humanities
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- Written by Shaun Johnston Shaun Johnston
- Published: May 6, 2021 May 6, 2021
- Hits: 1049 1049
The job of science is to tell us about the world. The job of the humanities is to tell us about ourselves. In this, the humanities have let us down. A crucial foundation for what we know about ourselves is our origin story but today we get our origin story from science: science’s account of how we evolved. Yes, we evolved. But why has science’s account of how that happened become our official origin story, the only one that may be taught to children at school? That’s purely an accident of history. And it’s one we should set right. It’s up to the humanities to summon up the necessary courage, point out the flaws in the scientific story, come up with a new and better origin story based on us having evolved, and make a case for that origin story supplanting the one pressed on us by science. More...
R.I.P. creationism. Stephen Meyer's "Return..."
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- Written by Shaun Johnston Shaun Johnston
- Published: April 9, 2021 April 9, 2021
- Hits: 996 996
Stephen Meyer’s ”The Return of the God Hypothesis” consists of two interwoven narratives. One, occupying the great bulk of the book, is an exhaustive compilation of every aspect of the physical world that today’s science can’t account for. Let’s refer to that as the text. The other consists of brief comments interspersed within the text suggesting that each of these unknowns can be accounted for better in terms of “intelligent design.” Let’s call that the “commentary.” Apply to that the critical reading needed to appreciate the text, and the commentary fall apart. Meyer lays bare for us the barrenness of creationism’s claims. More...