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Topic: John A. Davison: A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis
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posted 08. November 2004 20:00
A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis
by John A. Davison
Abstract: I propose that phylogeny took place in a manner similar to that of ontogeny by the derepression of preformed genomic information which was expressed through release from latency (derepression) by the restructuring of existing chromosomal information (position effects). Both indirect and direct evidence is presented in support of the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis.
To read the entire paper, click here.
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John A. Davison
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posted 17. December 2004 03:09
I am surprised that this paper has evoked no response after 5 weeks. I am fully prepared to defend it and have been indirectly on the Wagner thread. What am I to conclude by this absence of response?
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Phillip L. Engle
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posted 19. December 2004 05:38
John,
I have come to agree with you that the course of evolution has been largely prescribed (though it is hard to prove this with only the earth's evolutionary system to study!).
How would you compare and contrast your Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis with Robert F. DeHaan's ideas on macrodevelopment as an approach to studying evolution?
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John A. Davison
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posted 19. December 2004 09:21
DeHaan's macrodevelopment is in complete accord with the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis. Ontogeny and phylogeny are part of the same organic continuum, subject to the view that life was created only once, which, incidentally, has never been verified. Miracles, of which life is an excellent example, need not be limited as to their occurrences. I do not intend to seem mystical, only open minded. The more that we learn from molecular biology and chromosome function, the more obvious it becomes that chance never played a part in the evolutionary sequence. My position quite simply is, if not chance, then what?
An important ingredient in the evolutionary equation depends on the realization that the process has essentially stopped. We must now reconstruct what happened, a daunting task, but not insurmountable. It is that consideration that led me to propose the Semi-meiotic Hypothesis 20 years ago. It remains unacknowledged in the professional literature and, of course, for that reason, untested as well.
The evolutionary establishment (Darwinism) has abandoned the scientific method in favor of an hypothesis which they have conveniently assumed is untestable. Every hypothesis is testable and Darwinism is the most tested and failed in the history of science. It is time for some new ones. Dehaan and myself have pointed a way.
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John A. Davison
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posted 31. December 2004 10:38
There are two ways one might interpret the lack of interest at this thread.
"Silence gives consent."
Oliver Goldsmith
or
"Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn."
George Bernard Shaw
For whichever reason, I find it remarkable that a new hypothesis for organic evolution should evoke such a lack of interest. It is faring somewhat better at ARN.
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Jim Skipper
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posted 09. January 2005 13:31
John,
I read PEH. It is a lot shorter than I guess I thought it was going to be and it brings up a few questions.
I and I think most evolutionistas would agree that micro-evolution depends to a significant degree on pre-existing genetic code. Several observations of extensive variation within species, or the formation of sub-species as you have referred to some instances, certainly depend on the variation that is seen in species that sexually reproduce. Many of you arguments are specifically against the Darwinian model of evolution, which is generally considered to be outdated anyway, and certainly more evidence has arisen that puts mutation further in the backseat as the importance of the horizontal transfer of DNA between bacteria is revealed in research.
But where your paper would apply to the origin of species is unclear, which points I hope you can discuss.
Your paper posits the expression of existing, but inactive genes in response to some unknown stimulus (which from your other posts I suspect you mean direct intervention by a Designer). In fact, your paper seems to call for the independent creation of each species, or at the very least the creation of new genes. This would have to be the case because more complex species would not be able to evolve from less complex species because the lesser species do not have enough DNA.
Here is a little chart.
- organism - base pairs
- bacteria - 2 million
- yeast - 12 million
- fly - 165 million
- fish - 400 million
- bird - 1.5 billion
- mouse - 2.7 billion
- human - 3 billion
All those extra genes had to come from somewhere and your paper does not give any clues as to where that might be, unless, what I gather from the section around page 6 states (from which comes the following quote:
quote:
Is it not possible that
evolution might have involved, to some extent at least, the loss rather than the gain of
information?
In the above quote, it seems like you are proposing de-evolution, in which the world started with more compex creatures and slowly devolved to our current state of affairs. Is your idea that earlier species had all or more base pairs than humans currently do and that species with fewer genes have shed their excess?
If you could just clarify this portion of your paper I would be interested in discussing it more. Perhaps a sort of evolutionary tree at the DNA level, if that is what you mean, or a idea of what your paper implies for the origin of species, if PEH is intended to help explain that.
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John A. Davison
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posted 09. January 2005 14:29
What is this nonsense about 3 billion human base pairs when compared with the other organisms you have listed? What is your source? Many amphibians have far more DNA than humans. As for the sources of the information for evolution, I will quote two sources with whom I agree.
"Evolution is in a great measure an unfolding of preexisting rudiments."
Leo S. Berg, Nomogenesis page 406
"But according to Darwinian doctrine and Crick's central dogma, DNA is not only the depository and distributor of the information but its SOLE CREATOR. I do not believe this to be true,"
Pierre Grasse, page 224 (his emphasis)
"However that may be, the existence of internal factors affecting evolution has to be accepted by any objective mind,.."
Pierre Grasse, page 210
There is absolutely no evidence that the environment can in any way be implicated as influencing any evolving genome. Any evolutionary role for chance is mythological and unconfirmed for any higher organism. Prokaryotes are not models for diploid evolution and, as near as I can establish, evolution beyond the production of varieties or subspecies is no longer in progress. To maintain otherwise is without foundation.
I have absolutely no idea how all this was determined in the beginning or, more likely, beginnings, but that it must have been is in my view undeniable. I have tried very hard to discredit my own conclusions and have been quite unable to do so which is why I am publishing the PEH. I welcome others to attempt the same. I only ask that it can be done without personal denigration of either myself or my sources. One thing is for certain. NeoDarwinism must be abandoned. Hypotheses that have failed must be replaced. That is precisely what I have done beginning 20 years ago with the Semi-Meiotic Hypothesis and now with the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis which is its corollary. Both assume predetermined information and its release by derepression, a feature which also characterizes ontogeny.
John A. Davison
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Jim Skipper
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posted 10. January 2005 06:07
Human Genome Project
quote:
Project goals were to
identify all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA,
determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA,
Mouse DNA
quote:
The mouse genome contains about 2.6 billion base pairs compared to 2.9 billion base pairs in the human genome.
Frog and Chicken DNA
quote:
The African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) and the chicken (Gallus gallus) are important model organisms representing the amphibians and birds respectively. Both have similar genome sizes (about 1500 million base pairs).
Drosophila Genomic Sequence
quote:
The genome contains 12,000 genes on 4 chromosomes, and is made up from a total of 165 million base pairs.
Amoeba's are King
Now here, John, is a piece of information you can sink your teeth into. This site includes your base pair rich frog, Bufo bufo which has more than double the human base pairs, but even better...
quote:
One of the largest genomes belongs to a very small creature, Amoeba dubia. This protozoan genome has 670 billion units of DNA, or base pairs. The genome of a cousin, Amoeba proteus, has a mere 290 billion base pairs, making it 100 times larger than the human genome.
But of equal interest is that humans have 30000 genes for their 3 billion base pairs whereas Arabidopsis, a lowly flower pulls off 25,000 genes with its mere 125 million base pairs.
So given the above data and PEH, you could say that Amoeba dubia represents the earliest form of life, and as species evolved toward the present, genes from the early amoeba began expressing themselves to form more complex creatures, then as the current forms were established, they began degrading, losing parts of the DNA that did not apply to the species, thus limiting their ability to evolve.
Does that properly summarize PEH in line with the data about various genomes currently documented?
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John A. Davison
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posted 10. January 2005 08:19
Thank you Skipper.
These data are far more realistic than your previous ones. Thank you for correcting yourself.
Actually Bufo is a lightweight compared to the urodele amphibian Amphiuma. The problem of DNA and information content is that high DNA content is correlated with cell size. Amphiuma holds the world record for animal cell size in all of its organs. In general urodeles have large cells. It seems to be correlated with a sluggish metabolism as one might expect as the larger the cell, the relatively lower the cell surface through which oxygen, carbon dioxide and other metabolites must exchange.
Dimensionally cell surface is L squared and cell volume is L cubed. Surface per unit of volume reduces to 1/L, the larger the cell the smaller the surface concentration and, theoretically at least, the slower the metabolism.
In support of this both birds and mammals with their high metabolism have relatively small cells, a fraction of the volume of amphibians.It is intersting that my PhD thesis, fifty years ago was on cell size and metabolism in frogs. So if cell size is involved we cannot necessarily take DNA per cell as indicative of information content. It may just be that more DNA is required to govern a big cell than a small one.
On the other hand, urodeles might be the ideal forms to examine for their potential as subjects for experimental evolution. I just don't know. Some of the smallest animal cells are found in bats and shrews, also among the smallest mammals. I imagine, without examining the data, that would also be true for DNA content per cell. I am sure the data is there if someone wants to track it down. I am not in a position to do it.
It should also be noted that many ciliate protozoons have extraordinarily complex internal "organ systems" notably Diplodinium ecaudatum, which could indicate a premature appearance of evolutionary complexity an idea compatible with the notion that the information was present very early on in the evolutionary sequence. I recommend my paper "Ontogeny, Phylogeny and the Origin of Biological Information." 2000. Rivista di Biologia 93: 513-525 where you will find a picture of Diplodinium ecaudatum. Leo Berg called this sort of thing "phylogenetic acceleration I prefer to call it "phylogenenetic derepression" as that is in accord with PEH.
The evidence for internal factors affecting evolution cannot be denied as both Berg and Grasse independently claimed. What I have done is simply to expand those revelations by proposing that internal factors have been the SOLE cause of organic evolution, a position which I regard as in accord with everything we really know about the evolutionary process. I would welcome any evidence to the contrary and so far have received none.
There is also no compeling reason to subscribe to a single origin of life and plenty of reasons not to. Those origins are shrouded in mystery and will probably remain so.
John A. Davison
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John A. Davison
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posted 10. January 2005 08:21
Incidentally, Amoeba is one huge cell.
John A. Davison
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Jim Skipper
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posted 10. January 2005 19:48
quote:
These data are far more realistic than your previous ones. Thank you for correcting yourself.
Actually, if you look closely, you will see that the numbers in the second post are the same as the numbers in the first post, with the addition of some organisms, namely Bufo bufo and Amoeba dubia, and I stand by them.
A cursory examination of current sequencing efforts show that most sequences organisms have fewer base pairs than humans.
So do you think that some process has caused modern organisms to lose base pairs over time?
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John A. Davison
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posted 10. January 2005 19:53
If our ancestors were amphibians and I think they were, we sure have. What is your explanation?
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John A. Davison
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posted 10. January 2005 20:24
I should add that my suggestion (that is all that it was) that evolution may have involved the loss of information is pure speculation and is based only on the fact that ontogeny involves the loss of potential expressed information as well. One of the major things that mammals and birds have lost is the capacity for regeneration a tendency that began with the Anuran Amphibia and continued with the reptiles. The Urodela are wonderful regenerators, able to replace whole limbs. An analagous loss of potential characterizes the Arthropoda, with the Diptera and Lepidoptera, the highest representatives of the phylum, totally unable to regenerate anything. The primitive Crustacea, like crayfish, are wonderful regenerators like Urodele amphibians. That evolutionary series has also been accompanied by a loss of nuclear DNA.
As for the general idea of a loss of potential accompanying progress, I still maintain that ontogeny is a useful model for phylogeny. The important thing to recognize is that mutation and selection, those cornerstones of the Darwinian model, as creative elements remain mythological with no experimental support, yet widely assumed nevertheless. As a long time bench scientist it boggles my mind. What will it take before we abandon the Darwinian fairy tale?
John A. Davison
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John A. Davison
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posted 10. January 2005 20:28
In any event Jim Skipper, thanks for keeping the thread alive. I appreciate that.
John A.Davison
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Jim Skipper
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posted 12. January 2005 21:11
Well, if it had been for this thread, I might not have learned about the DNA of Bufo bufo or Amoeba dubia.
All my previous information about gene sequencing indicated that other species had few genes and base pairs than humans. However, after discovering the above, I can see that there is probably a selection effect going on.
Shorter DNA is easier to sequence, so we started with viruses and bacteria, then flies, mice and finally the massive Human Genome Project. Imagine the kind of effort it would take to fully sequence one of the monster amoebas!
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