Darwin's Biology of Intelligent Design

The iconic Darwin to whom most contemporary biologists look, including several of my colleagues at this conference, is not identical to the historical Darwin, the author of the Origin of Species. The iconic Darwin produced a theory that is non-progressivist and abandons all teleological assumptions about biological development. For this symbolic Darwin, natural selection operates mechanically to effect only opportunistic alterations, and so the evolutionary process lacks any directional force. Unlike the nature of old, guided by Divine intent, neo-Darwinian nature has no purpose. I believe the historical Darwin to be quite other than his neo-Darwinian Doppelganger. The historical Darwin constructed nature as displaying intelligent forethought; and he conceived natural selection to operate with purpose, ultimately to produce moral individuals, namely us. He thus construed evolution to be progressive, attaining ever higher levels of perfection, culminating in advanced civilization. Why have we thought otherwise? Because of a certain view about the nature of theories and because of neo-Darwinian predilections. The creative and ahistorical misreading of Darwin has, as a result, been quite advantageous to the development of modern science.
http://darwin-chicago.uchicago.edu/

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[BaileysBeads]

@SGTPeper1001 Social rules are prescriptive laws, but not all prescriptive laws have to be social rules. Computer programming also has prescriptive rules for example.

The difference between prescriptive and descriptive laws is that prescriptive laws can be broken and descriptive laws can't. Once a descriptive law is broken, the law stops describing the event.

[SGTPeper1001]

@BaileysBeads Ok. It is social rules. So the point of your first comment was : "The laws in the theory of evolution by natural selection are not social rules" ? I agree with you !

[BaileysBeads]

@SGTPeper1001 You may not drive through red light.

[SGTPeper1001]

@BaileysBeads : Can you give me an example of a prescriptive law please ?

[BaileysBeads]

The laws of natural selection are a descriptive law, not a prescriptive law. With other words, they're used as an abstract model to describe what happens instead of a law that is imposed from 'above'.