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."
Genesis Ch. 1
11) And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12) And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
21) And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
24) And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25) And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Amazing discoveries.
So we humans have just been waiting for the right time to "bloom"? 3.5 billion years of hibernation in Nature's waiting room?
Schwabe rejects mutation and natural selection as the mechanisms that produced species. [snip] The reasons for his rejection are the (perceived) missing intermediates in the fossil record and the failure to construct particular gene and protein phylogenies.
Another argument based on ignorance - what a surprise!
"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."
The Professor's puzzlement is itself hard to understand. The key comes early in this article.
The way biochemist Christian Schwabe saw it, Darwinian evolution should have given closely related animals similar sets of proteins.Yes, exactly. Common descent predicts that.
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.Here's the rub. From the Convergence of Independent Phylogenies:
Well-determined phylogenetic trees inferred from the independent evidence of morphology and molecular sequences match with an extremely high degree of statistical significance...So the problem is that protein trees do match other trees superbly. The professor has run off to solve a problem which didn't need solving. Maybe that wasn't so clear in the 1970s but it has become abundantly clear since then. The professor has come up with an answer (published 20 years ago in 1984) which was not needed then and is very far from needed now. No one is paying much attention to this little personal drama of the professor's since it isn't necessary....[T]he standard phylogenetic tree is known to 38 decimal places, which is a much greater precision than that of even the most well-determined physical constants. For comparison, the charge of the electron is known to only seven decimal places, the Planck constant is known to only eight decimal places, the mass of the neutron, proton, and electron are all known to only nine decimal places, and the universal gravitational constant has been determined to only three decimal places.
Consider a small organisim, say, a guppy. Presumably, this species has a single "genomic potential". So, I get a few dozen of these little guys and I set up shop.
I do some selective breeding of these fish, which is just another way of saying that I impose an arbitrary means of selecting the ones which will be allowed to survive and breed. The ones in the first tank will face an arbitrary selective pressure for big, colorful tails. The fish in the second tank will face a selective pressure for normal tails, but large size.
Eventually I get a strain of this fish with a big, colorful tail, and a second strain that that is larger than before. Which of these strains represents the true "genomic potential" of this species?
Obviously, each fish is well-adapted to the particular selective pressures in its particular tank. The "ultimate expression" of this evolutionary path depends both upon the fish, and on the environment in which the fish lives.
This guy seems to suggest that there is some latent form that each species is destined to evolve into, regardless of the environment - that selective pressures do not drive evolution. That's a really hard argument to take seriously.
Six days. God rested on the seventh.
It hurts the article that the reporter failed to question the premise (that molecules don't show evolution). The result is like watching Katie Couric interview Hillary Clinton.
Of course not - the puppy learned to swim & grew up to be a Labrador retriever. (And the genomes became Garden g'nomes.)
Neither time. In the tank bred for big tails, the wagging of the tail simply broke the tank. And in the tank bred for size, the puppy simply stood up and walked out.....
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