Professor Davison's Creed

John Davison contributes to a thread at EvC in a Showcase forum. This is for bloggers with a history to enable them to participate in a thread without invading and derailing other threads. One downside is that that blogger can demand the exclusion of any other participant. In John's case, this is pretty much everyone. Then he complains he doesn't get much feedback! So to help John's ideas reach a wider audience (not by much, I admit) I am pasting below John's list of his convictions.

Maybe this will stimulate some sort of response. I am now convinced of the following:

1. Evolution, including true speciation and the formation of any of the higher categories, is a thing of the past.

2. Sexual reproduction is incompetent as a progressive evolutionary device. It is much too conservative to ever produce anything very different from what it already is and always was. It has been demonstrated only to be able to produce varieties and that only in certain forms. None of those varieties are incipient species.

3. Population genetics never had anything to do with evolution beyond the distribution of Mendelian alleles in sexually reproducing populations, populations which can only undergo subspeciation. Subspecies are not incipient species either.

4. Allelic mutations have played no role in creative evolution but have probably played a role in some but not all extinctions.

5. Phylogeny, exactly like ontogeny, has been driven entirely from within with no role for the environment beyond that of acting as a stimulus or releaser of latent front-loaded specific information.

6. The entire Darwinian model is an illusion based on the assumption that phylogeny HAD an extrinsic cause. Such cause cannot be demonstrated because it never existed.

7. There has never been a role for chance in either ontogeny or phylogeny.

8. The number of times and the locations in the geological column when life was created are unknown as are the number of creators and their nature.