Evolution theory has its famed icons — peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, Haeckel’s embryos, Miller-Urey… (See Jonathan Wells’s book Icons of Evolution for more.) Joshua Swamidass is a Washington University computational biologist, theistic evolutionist, and ID critic who has strained to add a new icon to the list: cancer.
He’s got four arguments for why the dreaded disease demonstrates the innovative powers of Darwinian evolution, powers that advocates of intelligent design question. In a previous ID the Future podcast, biologist Ann Gauger talked with Sarah Chaffee about the first two of Dr. Swamidass’s arguments. In a new episode they discuss the final two, focusing on convergence and neutral theory.
No, really, Swamidass is serious. Cancer the destroyer shows the creative potency of unguided evolutionary mechanisms. This has actually been the subject of intense discussion over at the BioLogos website for a month now, with a 183 posts in a thread on their Open Forum page. Quite remarkable.
