Posted on 04/22/2004 8:46:34 AM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
Theorist: Darwin had it wrong S.C. professor says life forms arose without common origin
By Daniel Conover, the (Charleston) Post and Courier
CHARLESTON, S.C. - In the beginning, it was just the proteins.
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."
All he wants, Dr. Schwabe says, is a hearing by his peers.
"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."
I have dodged nothing, the answer is in my question. You missed it, Oh well.
BTW, I haven't been hostile at all. If you took it that way, perhaps you should look to your attitude, the one you displayed when you invited a flame war. Your words were, if memory serves, "flame away."
If you are looking for a flame war I suppose every discussion looks like one.
And then we also have THIS to contend with:
2 Peter 3:8
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
It was lost on the other poster. He also doesn't understand literary device. He sets up a strawman, one that says that in the Genesis account is the blow by blow eyewitness account by an uninterested scientist and that everyone takes it that way. Then he knocks down the strawman.
I remain bored with that approach.
Well put!
There's an interesting debate going-on at ISCID
There is only one problem with Darwinian evolution. It is the same problem that Lamarckian evolution has presented. Both Have failed endless critical experimental analyses. Accordingly, both must be rejected. Lamarckism has been largely rejected. Why Darwinism survives is a mystery. I hope I may be forgiven for introducing my own Semi-meiotic Hypothesis, but the simple undeniable fact is that it has not been subjected to experimental analysis. Until it is it must be considered viable. There is also evidence accumulating from molecular biology that fundamental gene families common to huge groups of organisms have existed since very early in evolutionary history, which certainly is compatible with the notion that chromosome restructuring alone can serve to release novel genetic expressions which were latent and unexpressed perhaps for many millions of years. Both the Semi-meiotic Hypothesis and the correlated Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis have yet to be even recognized, let alone tested. It may prove that there is really no significant role for micromutational (base pair) genetic alterations in determining evolutionary destiny. In any event, as I and others have indicated, there is no compelling evidence that evolution above the species level is even occurring. That certainly is the perspective of Pierre Grasse, Robert Broom and of all people, the author of "Evolution: The Modern Synthesis", Julian Huxley, not to mention myself. Godfrey Hardy felt that mathematics existed independent of the human condition and needed only to be discovered. I accept that interpretation and have chosen to extend that prefomed concept to include the whole of science to include evolution which I now regard as essentially an emergent phenomenon prescribed just as certainly as were the conic sections, the periodic table of the elements and all of Newtonian physics and Einstein's relativity. Science is nothing but the discovery of what is there. That is the best evidence against the Darwin/Wallace hypothesis. They discovered nothing. They simply reacted to their common reading experience with the works of Malthus and Lyell. The laws of physics have been discovered. The laws that have driven evolution (past tense) will ultimately be discovered. When that finally occurs, and I firmly believe it will, both Lamarckism and Darwinism, like the Phlogiston of chemistry and the Ether of physics will become nothing but historical curiosities.
~Nosivad (John A. Davison, Ph.D.)
Dissension in the ranks!
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