Thanks for the very thoughtful post (I found it by way of Larry Moran’s post).

I’m not proposing that genetics instructors (not trained in ethics) should tell students answers to these partly-ethical questions. But the students will need to consider many of these questions in their daily lives, and genetics courses should teach them the scientific information they’ll need for this. For example, students need to understand what cloning of animals is, and how such animals compare to those produced by more natural means, before they can consider the ethical issues about them.

Rosemary Redfield, from the University of British Columbia in Canada, published an interesting paper on re-vamping the university introduction to genetics course.

I applaud the idea of revamping. When I took biology, the genetics section was mainly about Mendel’s laws. We now know a lot more than was available to Mendel.

Facts are cheap. I do not need to seek out a geneticist to tell me the phases of mitosis or the latest research in genetics; I can just “Google-search” it. The expert is no longer needed for his or her mental database. Now the expert is needed to discern and assess ideas.

I think this was always true, though perhaps it has become more obvious in the Internet era.

Redfield suggests that it is the role of the scientist to address ethical questions.

I disagree with that, as stated. However, I’m not sure whether I am disagreeing with Redfield.

Ethical questions are not scientific questions. It is the role of the scientist to address scientific questions.

It is the role of a citizen (I’ll include “citizen of the world” there) to address ethical questions. And scientists are citizens. But it is in their role as citizens, rather than their role as scientists, that they should be addressing ethical questions.

If I am reading the post correctly, I think I am agreeing with Heather Zeiger on this.

As for Redfield’s suggestion of putting this in the curriculum – it depends on what she means. Yes, science students should be trained to think about these questions. But they should also be expected to understand that these are not scientific questions. By virtue of their specialized knowledge, scientists are perhaps in a strong position to understand the ethical questions. But they should use that knowledge to help others understand some of the consequences of ethical choices, so that non-experts can be better able to contribute to public discussions of ethical issues.

I’ve been arguing that the existence of such a general power of “adaptivity” or “intelligent agency” cannot be explained by the theory of natural selection, but rather is the tacit presupposition that gives that theory its superficial plausibility.

I suspect that many evolutionary biologists would mostly agree, except that they would object to that word “superficial” near the end of that statement.

But if natural selection cannot explain this power or capacity, what can?

Perhaps my series of posts on a natural basis for purpose in nature.

The Darwinian View of Life …

The items that you list seem to come from a creationist caricature of Darwinian thinking. There’s a wide diversity of Darwinian thinking. While Jerry Coyne might argue that free will is an illusion, other Darwinians will disagree with Coyne on that.

Micro-organisms can evolve much quicker than multi-cellulars to respond to any changes that the MC’s may generate to defend themselves against SC’s.

In other words there should be no MC’s in the world today as evolution is stacked against them with respect to SC’s.