|
|
|||
Gods |
Archaeopteryx site:freerepublic.com |
||
|
· Discover · Nat Geographic · Texas AM Anthro News · Yahoo Anthro & Archaeo · Google · · The Archaeology Channel · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists · |
|||
THE CENTRE HOLDS
http://www.kronia.com/library/journals/center.txt
PALEONTOLOGY AND BIOLOGY
Inseparable from the geological record is the paleontological and biological.
This touches a part of Velikovsky’s work which can legitimately be called a theory -that of catastrophic mutation. The bulk of his effort has been towards a reconstruction of specific events, while theterm “theory”, is better applied to a general account (verifiable by experimentation).
Darwinian evolution lays claim to the status of a theory not because it can be experimentally verified, but only because it claims that processes that occurred in the past are also occur- ring unnoticeably in the present.
Velikovsky’s theory of mutations, on the other hand, is supported by experiments al- ready performed (cf. Muller’s subjection of vinegar flies to x-rays).3 Here future possibilities are endless. It is even a bit frightening to speculate how techniques of inducing mutation might be sophisticated through experiments. From the point of view of historical reconstruction, however, knowledge thus gained will be invaluable. Like the geologist, the biologist will have to face more seriously the fact that between strata many new species appear abruptly. His task is to devise laws of mutation refined enough to explain how a given species came from onepreceding it and why it took the form it did.
The early 19th century evolutionist, Etienne Saint-Hilaire, speculated that birds might have been
generated directly from fish through sudden mutation in catastrophic circumstances, but he was not prepared to explain the mechanics.
A second large subject for biological experimentation is the old Lamarckian theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. It has never been decisively disproven. If anything, increased experimental sophistication has only revealed greater complexity in genetic structures leaving the possibility of the subtlest kinds of transmission wide open. Inheritance of behavior patterns laid down in catastrophic circumstances might explain a
number of biological enigmas-bird migration; swarming; acute sensitivity of many species to the subtlest earth tremors, solar eclipses, etc. The inheritance of memory has already been suggested by experiments on rats and
worms.