Theorist: Darwin Had it Wrong

Theorist: Darwin had it wrong S.C. professor says life forms arose without common origin

The way biochemist Christian Schwabe saw it, Darwinian evolution should have given closely related animals similar sets of proteins.

It was a simple idea, just a way to prove the cellular legacy of millions of years of common ancestry. Only it didn’t work.

The mismatched proteins were just a stray thread in the grand tapestry of life, yet the flaw gnawed at the back of the professor’s mind – until one day at Harvard University in 1970, when a new idea struck him in the middle of a lecture.

"That’s not going to work that way," Dr. Schwabe said aloud, and his students watched in bewilderment as their instructor spent the rest of the class working out the first bits of his idea on the blackboard.

What Dr. Schwabe began that day would become, by 1984, something he called the "genomic potential hypothesis:" the idea that life on Earth arose not from a single, random-chance event, but from multiple, predictable, chemical processes.

As bold as that idea seemed, it was tame compared with the second part of his theory: that evolution by natural selection – a cornerstone of Darwinian thought – was a 19th-century illusion.

Rather than a world of diversely adapted species with one common origin, Dr. Schwabe saw each modern species as the ultimate expression of its own independent origin.

Evolution wasn’t about adaptation, Dr. Schwabe said, but the perfection of each species’ original "genomic potential."

He and a colleague published the first paper on the idea in 1984, and the German-born professor settled in to await the inevitable critical response. It never came.

More articles in small academic journals followed in 1985 and 1990, but they, too, failed to provoke debate.

Today, Dr. Schwabe is a professor of biochemistry at the Medical University of South Carolina, a federally funded investigator who has accounted for more than $4 million in research funding, much of it related to drugs that regulate blood flow.

He has published more than 100 scholarly works and received five patents for his discoveries.

Yet when it comes to his most provocative idea, Dr. Schwabe is practically an invisible man. His articles on genomic potential hypothesis – GPH – typically are returned without meaningful comment by editors, most recently by the prestigious journal Science, and sometimes it seems as if the only people paying attention to his work are Internet fringe-dwellers.

"I think one of the most brilliant and bravest thinkers in America lives in Charleston, S.C.," said Ron Landes, a scientific publisher from Texas, "and nobody knows about him."

"If they don’t like it, they should tell me factually what is wrong," he said. "If they think it’s no good, they have the obligation to disprove it."

That’s the ideal of science we all learned in grade school. But as Dr. Schwabe continues to demonstrate, the practice of science is a bit more complex.

It takes an educated specialist to evaluate scientific claims; new discoveries are practically meaningless until they are published in major journals.

Publication signifies that the science behind an article is solid and that the idea, right or wrong, is worthy of study. This system of establishing credibility, called peer review, is essential to the scientific process, yet not every idea is worthy of serious, high-level peer review.

But the critical question in Dr. Schwabe’s case isn’t whether peer review works – rather, it’s, "Can unorthodox but potentially significant ideas get access to legitimate peer review?"

Though peer review remains essential to the scientific method, "It is not a requirement that anyone else pay attention to you," said Jerry Hilbish, professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina.

Yet the big journals also have a lot to lose by missing out on a big breakthrough, he said.

"It is normal in science for new ideas that contradict old ones to be resisted or ignored for a while," Dr. Bauer said. "Many people in that situation are stunned that they’re not being listened to, because science is supposed to be so open to new ideas. But the reality is that (science) is open to new things, but just not things that are too new."

For Darwinism to be true, you must have new species arise through the injection of NEW information.

We do from the Carassius Gibelio to the Carassius auratus, The Gibel Carp to the Goldfish

There has been plenty of "New" information that has evolved in the Goldfish that are not found in the original Gibel Carp, So it's a gain not a loss. There are scores if not hundreds of new structures, organs, body shapes, tails shapes and numbers, types of scales, colors, tolerances, etc. Most of which are the result of multiple genes (i.e. the bubble eye in the bottom center picture takes 3 separate genes just for the sacs to form) that were gained separately/independently.

The information must improve the fitness of the organism for their environment,

It did, Try raising a carp in a fishbowl and see how long it last

and the new information must arise at a rate that explains the biological diversity of Earth and the fossil record.

Goldfish arose ~1100 years ago, So even if we take an extremely unlikely low estimate and say the Goldfish only differentiate from the carp by only 0.0005% (Their different chromosome number guarantees it's way higher) using simple math that would mean that if the genetics of a species can change 0.0005% in 1100 years then in 4.5 billion years the genetics of an organism can change by 2,250,000% which way more than the diversity of all life on Earth.

The first two conditions seem at least theoretically sound but have not been shown and the last has not come close to being met.

Yes it has in the Goldfish .

[For starters, there's Canis familiaris, which is no longer the same species as Canis lupus.]
So, you are saying that Canis Familiaris (the Dog) and Canis Lupus (the Wolf)

Gray wolf. There is more than one species of wolf, you know.

are different species since they can no longer interbreed?

No, I'm saying they are different species because they are, even though they can in fact interbreed.

Well, I guess that puts the wolf hybrid people out of business, they cannot breed wolf/dog hybrids.

Nice try. Of course they can.

[Zea mays is no longer the same species as Zea mexicana, from which it arose.]
Zea Mays and Zea Mexicana are closely related and can hybridize (as can a Donkey and a Horse).

Yes, so? They're still separate species.

You're going to show that one gave rise to the other.

I am? Why should I reproduce the work of countless botanists?

Same with the two varieties of Triticum (wheat).

And I repeat my same response.

[How many more would you like?]
Just one would suffice.

I gave you three -- would you like for me to narrow them down to one for you?

You might want to review what constitutes a Species first, and quit giving examples of subspiecies within the same Species.

Don't try to teach your grandpa to suck eggs, sonny.

If you think that the ability to interbreed negates two populations from being separate species, you really need to go learn some more biology.

While it's true that two groups totally unable to interbreed are inarguably different species, the converse is not true (i.e., being able to interbreed is not proof that they are the same species).

Lions and tigers are clearly diferent species, and differ markedly in countless different ways (morphologically, behaviorally, different vocalizations, etc.), and yet they can still interbreed.

There are many different criteria of species separation, including folk, biological, morphological, genetic, paleontological, evolutionary, phylogenetic and biosystematic.

Even in the criteria (biological species) that relies most heavily upon the interbreeding issue, the test is not complete inability to interbreed, but only relative inability. Groups which can interbreed but tend not to in the wild are still classified as separate species, as well as groups which do interbreed in the wild at times but produce (fertile) offspring which merely have some form of *reduced* fertility. The dog/wolf issue is relevant here, since wolves (both male and female) are only fertile during a few months of the year, whereas dogs are fertile year-round (and also produce more pups per litter). A dog/wolf hybrid often follows the wolf breeding pattern, and thus is clearly less fertile than a purebred dog. Furthermore dogs and wolves seldom mate in natural settings due to the social/breeding behavior of wolf packs, which sets up an additional reproductive barrier between the two groups -- wolves recognize the difference between wolves and dogs, even if you don't. These are just some of the reasons they are considered different species (even within the narrow criteria you try to shoehorn things into).

And if you really want to stick to the overlysimplistic "can they interbreed or not" test, I should point out that there's no reason to conclude that humans and chimps could not interbreed successfully -- biologically we're a hell of a lot closer to each other (both biochemically and genetically) than many other species which can successfully interbreed. It's just that no one's wanted to try the test yet (or if they have, no one's admitted to it). Or maybe it's a variation on an old joke punchline ("there are some things even a chimp won't do"). So does that make us the same species?

The difficulty of a "one size fits all" definition of "species" has long been recognized -- so much so that Darwin devoted an entire chapter of "On the Origin of Species" to it (chapter two). His conclusion then, 140+ years ago, was pretty much the same as today's (much more formalized) version -- the demarcation between "variety" (or "subspecies") and "species" has to be done on a case by case basis, taking into account all the relevant issues, because biology (i.e. life) itself is a messy/complex thing that doesn't restrict itself to such nice and neat formations that would make a single definition fit all cases or all situations..

Domestic dogs are a different species from their gray wolf ancestors because, in short, dogs are no longer wolves and wolves are not domestic dogs. There are clear and distinct morphological, behavioral, and genetic differences between the two groups. The same goes for domestic versus wild wheat or corn.

You may then want to demonstrate that this was done by selective breeding.

The histories of dogs, wheat, and corn are well known and unmistakably intertwined with mankind's domestication of them, their genetics make clear their origins, and the nature of their changes are precisely of the type that are explanable by selective breeding and not natural selection. What more would you like?

Can Evolution Create Homologous Structures by Different Paths? 04/22/2004
Günter Thebien (Friedrich Schuller U, Jena, Germany) is baffled about how two plants arrived at similar structures by different evolutionary pathways. In the April 22 issue of Nature,¹ he asks,

Structures that occur in closely related organisms and that look the same are usually considered to be homologous — their similarity is taken to arise from their common ancestry [sic]. Common sense suggests that the more complex such structures are, the less likely they are to have evolved independently and the more valuable they should be for studying systematics. But what if ‘obviously’ identical organs have arisen through two mutually exclusive developmental routes? (Emphasis added in quotes.)

He points to a discovery by Glover et al. (Gene 331, 1–7; 2004) of just such a what-if situation. Two species in the nightshade family (of which tomatoes are a member) that have almost identical looking “pepperpots” or anther cones in their flowers. Yet mutation experiments on the genes that develop the structures show that neither could be related to the other by common ancestry, because they develop under different pathways. “So the most plausible conclusion,” he claims, “is that pepperpots originated twice independently in the lineages that led to tomato and bittersweet.” If so, this means trouble for systematists:

Molecular systematic analysis confirms that tomato and bittersweet are closely related, and the traditional view would be that their pepperpot cones are obviously homologous. But genetic tinkering and mutant analysis show that they probably are not — that they are convergent [sic], having taken different routes to the same end. Life’s potential to invent [sic] complex structures more than once may worry systematists, who depend on reliable characters to reconstruct relationships between organisms. But it will please anyone who admires nature’s [sic] innovative power.

¹Günter Thebien, “Developmental genetics: Bittersweet evolution,” Nature 428, 813 (22 April 2004); doi:10.1038/428813b.

Homology is one of those words that embeds Darwinian assumptions into the terminology. The Darwin Party’s word games go like this:

Homologous structures are similarities that Darwinians believe are related by common ancestry.
Analogous structures are similarities that Darwinians believe are not related by common ancestry. In some unspecified way, they arrived at the same pattern by “convergent evolution.”
Thus, by waving either hand, the Darwin show can go on. But when both hands are waving, they might collide. Thebein’s hand-waving term “convergent evolution” has just collided with the hand-waving Darwinian concept of homology. Now what? Nature has thrown the Darwinians a curve; a complex structure that “common sense” says could not have evolved twice independently. This is where the Darwinians go to Plan C:
Homologous-convergent structures prove Nature is tricky.
Since, to a Darwinian, Nature is a personified goddess tinkering with her creations, she has free will and even a sense of humor, in addition to “innovative power.” By employing fast-talking equivocation with the science security guards, the Darwinians avoid having their science badges disqualified. They can remain and enjoy the melodrama, chuckling at the dirty trick “Nature” played on the systematists. They never catch on that the joke’s on them.

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