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Author
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Topic: John A. Davison: Is Evolution Finished?
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Mann
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Member # 1226
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posted 28. March 2004 08:10
As a P.S. to my previous reply I would like to point to the fact that I am not a biologist. The argument about vertebrate origin may for all I know be an old one. I still think that I am entitled to participate in a scientific discussion where reason, not only merit, should rank highly. Otherwise there is something wrong with the discussion.
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nosivad
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posted 28. March 2004 08:26
Mann Excuse me but nothing is consistent with Darwinism, absolutely nothing.
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charlie d.
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Member # 159
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posted 28. March 2004 09:44
nosivad:
If I didn't know you already know genetics, I'd gather you have no clue, and would try to give you an impromptu lesson. But you don't need one, you are just evading.
mann:
You are knew here, uh? As you may have noticed, reason does not rank very high in this thread. LOL.
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Mann
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posted 28. March 2004 11:09
nosivad: I understand that this is your main concern. I can also understand that you are "through responding to questions which either [you] have already answered or [your] sources answered long ago".
But how about answering some new ones? How about the paper from Korschak et al.? You pointed to this particular paper to show findings by means of modern molecular biology, that can overthrow darwinism. I still don't see how that paper supports your hypothesis. I am not informed of the latest issues in phylogeny, but I do know a great deal about biochemistry and molecular biology. I would say that in the afforementioned paper, darwinism scored a few points. But don't let that put you off, I will be willing to defend any model or theory which can account for data and predict the outcome of new experiments.
I take it you like to teach. As a student, I was never presented with any current theory that contradicted darwinism, so in that respect you could say that I am still a student. Please feel free to lecture me at any time.
Charlie d: I am an intractable optimist.
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nosivad
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posted 28. March 2004 11:37
charlie d
Your sarcasm contributes nothing to this discussion. You bet I am not being reasonable. That is exactly what has always been wrong with Darwinism. It is wonderfully reasonable and just as totally wrong. "Hypotheses have to be reasonable - facts don't". Darwinism is, like Lamarckism, a myth, completely unsubstantiated by experiment or observation. The subject of this thread was in the beginning my paper "Is Evolution Finished?, apparently a consideration summarily rejected by the Darwinists of which you seem to be a typical example. Since you obviously have nothing but disdain for my proposals, let me quote Pierre Grasse on the subject as follows.
"The period of great fecundity is over: biological evolution appears as a weakened process, declining or near its end. Aren't we witnessing the remains of an immense phenomenon close to extinction? Aren't the small variations which are being recorded everywhere the tail end, the last oscillations of the evolutionary movement? Aren't our plants, our animals lacking some mechanisms which were present in the early flora and fauna?" page 71
My sin was to answer yes to these three questions and accordingly I proposed the semi-meiotic hypothesis as a potential mechanism either no longer or rarely in operation. I am confident that the intractable Darwinian will answer no to the same three questions posed by Grasse. The simple truth is that organic evolution (past tense of course) was emergent and driven largely by internal factors about which we remain ignorant except to say that they were definitely involved. That is the basis of my Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis. Such internal factors were also proposed both by Grasse and Berg. All I have done is to extend their views to form a general hypothesis.
As for your remarks about my knowledge of genetics, I know enough Mendelian (sexual) genetics to know that all of the point mutations in the world and all the natural or artificial selection for or against them will never transgress the species barrier, let alone the genus, family, order, class or phylum.
"He that I am reading always seems to have the most force".
Montaigne
You Darwinians have just been reading the wrong literature.
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Ron Okimoto
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Member # 1012
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posted 28. March 2004 12:08
Novisad wrote:
quote:
As for your remarks about my knowledge of genetics, I know enough Mendelian (sexual) genetics to know that all of the point mutations in the world and all the natural or artificial selection for or against them will never transgress the species barrier, let alone the genus, family, order, class or phylum.
I know that some people consider chimps and humans to be in the same genus, but they are currently classified in their own. I'd like to see you define the "species barrier" that could never be transgressed between other apes and humans. It would be even better if you could use Mendelian genetics to do it. It doesn't do you any good to make these pronouncements if you can't back them up.
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nosivad
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posted 28. March 2004 14:29
Ron, I am being misrepresented again, this time by you. What I claimed was that sexual reproduction, coupled with point mutation and selection is incapable of exceeding the species barrier. I have enough difficulty being understood as it is. I definitely do not regard chimps and humans as being in the same genus and I am surprised anyone else does. You seem to forget that Mendelian genetics is the genetics made manifest through the segregation and recombination characteristic of sexual reproduction. I happen to believe that there is an entirely different sort of genetics which is cryptic in the genome and can be (or at least was in the past) exposed by derepression. That is the central core of my Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis. This cryptic genetics is also subject to proof through experimental semi-meiosis if anyone has the brains to test for it. Now that I have had a plastic lens implanted into my left eye, I may be able to return to the laboratory and do it myself. Of course that would require a sponsoring institution crazy enough to support such an obviously hair-brained scheme. It sure won't be the University of Vermont. Like this forum, it's crawling with intractable Darwinians. Incidentally I have made very few pronouncements that have not already been made by far greater scientists than myself countless times in the past. Just take the six to whom I dedicated the Manifesto and the Ontogeny paper for starters. Not one of them ever accepted Darwinism in any form and not one of them was a sedentary armchair theoretician like Ernst Mayr, Stephen J. Gould or Richard Dawkins. There, now I feel much better.
[ 28. March 2004, 14:57: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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Ron Okimoto
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posted 28. March 2004 15:14
quote:
Ron, I am being misrepresented again, this time by you. What I claimed was that sexual reproduction, coupled with point mutation and selection is incapable of exceeding the species barrier.
You can't just keep claiming to be misrepresented. Present the limits that you see between the transition of an ape like organism to a human. What are they and what evidence do you have that they exist? If you can't identify these limits, what makes you think that they exist?
You must know by now that chimps and humans differ as much in their nuclear DNA as horses and donkeys do and for some reason horses and donkeys are still in the same genus. In fact for the genes that have been looked at like hemoglobin and cytochrome C horses and donkeys are even more genetically divergent than chimps and humans. The amino acid sequences for these genes are identical between chimps and humans, but they vary by one or two substitutions between horses and donkeys.
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Rex Kerr
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Member # 632
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posted 28. March 2004 15:24
nosviad, apparently you don't have any idea what I'm talking about. I'll try to explain it even more simplistically.
Suppose there is a gene for G which there are three different alleles in humans. I'll label them hum-G.1, hum-G.2 and hum-G.3. Now suppose we look in chimpanzees.
If chimpanzees have the same gene, what do their alleles look like?
They may have all new alleles, chimp-G.4, chimp-G.5, and chimp-G.6, for example.
They may have one or two human alleles: chimp-G.1, chimp-G.2, chimp-G.4.
Or they may have all the human alleles: chimp-G.1, chimp-G.2, chimp-G.3.
Consider this last case. You don't deny common ancestry, so we assume that there was a common ancestor of chimp and human. If chimp and human both have alleles G.1, G.2, and G.3, then their ancestor presumably had all three also. If we were talking about genes instead of alleles, this would all be very straightforward so far.
Here's the problem, though. How can the ancestor transmit G.1, G.2, *and* G.3 to both the chimp and human lineages via semi-meiosis? Semi-meiosis, as you mention in the Manifesto, favors homozygosity. And it forbids more than two alleles from coming through any semi-meiotic speciation event.
Why? Because the parent could have had at most two alleles before the speciation event. Its offspring can only get its alleles. After the speciation event, reproductive isolation has been established, and the extra alleles can't be picked up later. That is, chimp and human could share G.1 and G.2, or G.1 and G.3, or G.2 and G.3, but no more. Having three or more shared alleles doesn't work.
Hopefully it is crystal clear now what the problem is. In my previous post I provided four references to cases where there are more than three alleles of a single gene shared between different species.
(Also, you referred me to V-3, which contains fears of accumulation of mutations leading to extinction. Are you unaware of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium? Or are you making a more complex claim, such as that eventually, groups of mutations (each rare individually) in different members of the species will be incompatible with each other?)
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nosivad
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posted 28. March 2004 15:28
Ron if it makes you feel good to put man and chimp in the same genus, be my guest. I couldn't care less. Otherwise I have no idea what you are talking about. Based on observable chromosomal restructurings I would estimate there were no more than say a dozen discrete intermediates betwee chimp and human. There sure weren't any gradual transitions as the Darwinian fable demands. It is very obvious that we are not able to communicate. Sorry about that. Leave me to my fantasies.
Sorry about the misprint Ron . It was V-2
Try reading the whole thing before you respond again. I am tired of having to refer to my earlier work and that of my many predecessors. It should not be necessary, so I won't do it any more. I have about had it with this whole useless enterprise. Read and enjoy.
[ 28. March 2004, 15:32: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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Scott
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posted 28. March 2004 16:54
Mann wrote:
quote:
Why is it nonsense to say that Bateson, Schindewolf, Grasse and Goldschmidt are not up to date?
re: Schindewolf
: From Book News, Inc.
English translation of a 1950 text on paleontology by the influential German paleontologist, Otto Schindewolf. Schindewolf's anti-Darwin arguments of catastrophic events and mass extinction drew some scorn from neo-Darwinian evolutionists who stressed gradual change over time. Current research, however, suggests Schindewolf had a point. Thoughtfully introduced by Stephen Jay Gould, this controversial volume should rekindle the fires of debate. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
: Book Description
Now available in English for the first time, Basic Questions in Paleontology is a landmark work in twentieth-century evolution and paleontology. Originally published in German in 1950, Schindewolf's book was highly controversial for its thoroughgoing anti-Darwinism, but today his ideas are remarkably relevant to current research in evolutionary biology.
"[This book] would rank number one on my list of items awaiting translation from the history of twentieth-century evolutionary theory."--Stephen Jay Gould
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Pim van Meurs
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Member # 541
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posted 28. March 2004 17:23
GOuld has written on various occasions on issues relevant to Schindewolf
Here Gould takes Johnson to task for calling Schindewolf a saltationist.
quote:
On page 60, he calls the German paleontologist Otto Schindewolf a saltationist, whereas Schindewolf's subtle theory contained a central element of insensible change in a process that he called proterogenesis (gradual seepage of juvenile traits into adult stages). Schindewolf spent most of his career studying small and continuous changes in ammonite suture patterns. On page 103, Johnson raises the old chestnut against a natural origin of earthly life by arguing: "the possibility that such a complex entity could assemble itself by chance is fantastically unlikely." Sure, and no scientist has used that argument for twenty years, now that we understand so much more about self-organizing properties of molecules and other physical systems. The list goes on.
Some confuse Gould and Eldredge's punctuated equilibrium with saltationism
As Davison reported himself
quote:
In the forward to the english translation of Schindewolf's book, after identifying Schindewolf as the greatest paleontologist of his day, Gould found it necessary to describe Schindewolf's conclusions as "spectacularly flawed".
[ 28. March 2004, 19:20: Message edited by: Pim van Meurs ]
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Mann
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posted 28. March 2004 17:39
Scott: I did not intend to attribute any merit or lack thereof, to the fact that the work of these gentlemen is not entierly up to date with current theories of molecular evolution mechanisms.
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nosivad
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posted 28. March 2004 18:15
Pim you have once again twisted things all out of their original meaning. Schindewolf was definitely a saltationist. Why else would he have said that we might as well stop looking for missing links as they never existed? As for Gould, in his forward to Schindewolf's "Basic Questions in Paleontology" Gould identifies Schindewolf as the greatest paleontologist of his day and then finds it necessary to claim that Schindewolf's views were "spectacularly flawed". It is Gould's views that were spectacularly flawed as are the views of every other neoDarwinian. I cannot believe the lengths to which you will go to confuse and obstruct. To even suggest that Schindewolf was not a saltationist is inexcusable. I can only assume you have never read his book. I also believe that you do such things deliberately. Your tactics are wearing thin with me. Who cares what Phillip Johnson thinks anyway. At least he had the sense to cite Grasse in his debunking of the Darwinian myth. The Darwinians have been living a life of complete denial right from 1859 to the present day. Your quote from Gould proves that Gould was also in complete denial of Schindewolf's transparent views. I cannot believe the lengths some, like yourself, find it necessary to go in order to preserve and protect the Darwinian fable. You even found it necessary to take my statement out of context in an attempy to further confuse the issue. Do you really believe I would dedicate my work to someone with whom I had fundamental differences? These tactics constitute an intellectual scandal and you can be certain that I will continue to expose them as such. David Raup put his finger on it -
"Both sides will continue to lie, cheat and steal in order to make their points".
Amen
[ 28. March 2004, 18:41: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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Pim van Meurs
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posted 28. March 2004 19:21
Davison: Pim you have once again twisted things all out of their original meaning. Schindewolf was definitely a saltationist.
How can I twist things out of their original meaning when I am quoting Gould? Gould does not consider Schindewolf a saltationist.
Davison: I cannot believe the lengths to which you will go to confuse and obstruct.
I will let the moderator decide on this issue. Your accusations have become tiresome and do a disservice to the level of conduct and discussion generally witnessed on ISCID.
To support Gould's thesis I present the following
quote:
17The theory (though not the label) of punctuated equilibria goes back at least as far 1936, when Schindewolf proposed (as summarized by R. Goldschmidt) that "macroevolution on a higher level takes place in an explosive way within a short geological time, followed by a slower series of orthogenetic perfections." R. Goldschmidt, The Material Basis of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 395.
Link
Punctuated equilibrium (not to be confused with saltationism).
[ 28. March 2004, 19:53: Message edited by: Pim van Meurs ]
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