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."
Also, Genesis is the subject of my doctoral dissertation. ["The Roots of the Biblical Worldview in Genesis 1 - 11"]
When I worked at a university research institute, one of the offices had a sign on the wall that read something like "If you're doing something really new, you don't have any peers."
I found that out the hard way when the National Science Foundation rejected one of my proposals for three years in a row, even though I modified it each time to respond to the objections of the "peer" reviewers. I finally gave up on the idea. Later, when personal computers came out, I realized I no longer needed a grant to solve the problem. I could do it at home on my own PC. I completed the research and got two conference papers and two journal articles out of it. The results of the research were valid, as shown by acceptance by the journal reviewers, but the research proposal itself couldn't get through the "starting gate" of peer review.
I never again submitted a proposal to the NSF. Why fight the problem of incompetent "peers?"
I'm currently Associate Editor of a scientific journal. When a paper comes in, I make a point of selecting the reviewers carefully, to assure that the paper gets a fair review and isn't tossed off because it doesn't fit the current research paradigm.
Not. The purpose of a professional research paper is to spell out the researcher's methodology in such a way that it can be replicated by other researchers. If, during the attempts to replicate the research, the peer-reviewers get contradictory results, or if the paper isn't written in such a way as to make the methodology unreplicable (c.f. Pons and Fleischman), then it is typically rejected by the peer-review process. Personal views do not enter into the equation. It's not a perfect process, but it comes as close to being objective as humans have managed to get.
But they're all still guppies. At the end of your "experiment" you mix the two populations and after a while the differences you achieved by your selective breeding will disappear.
ML/NJ
He has published more than 100 scholarly works and received five patents for his discoveries.
But wait: that can't be!
Scientific heretics are supposed to have their careers destroyed, their homes sacked and burned, and their names effaced from the public record unto the seventh generation. What happened to the Code of Suppression that all scientists agree to implement when they are granted their Science Licenses?
Based on this article, it seems they were wrong.
Obviously.
Proving that theory A is wrong does not prove that theory B is right. Proving theory A is wrong, though, increases the incentive to consider theory B.
Two points:
1) That depends on which tank I put them in. When I put them back togther, the final form of the resulting population still depends upon the environment, and on the selective pressures present there. Animals evolve (as best they can) to adapt to the pressures imposed on them. Their final form is determined both by their environment, and their ability to adapt to it.
2) If I continue the experiment long enough, and keep selecting for new attributes, eventually they will be so different that they will no longer be able to interbreed at all. At some point they are no longer guppies, but become some new species.
Except that the literal interpretation of Genesis does not qualify as a scientific theory under any circumstances. So if you are suggesting that Genesis is theory B, I would have to disagree that it merits any consideration whatsoever as a scientific alternative to Darwin.
Really?
You may believe this, but there is no evidence that I know of to support such a statement. Do you think the ones that are not guppies any longer will have a different chromosome count?
ML/NJ
Really?
You may believe this, but there is no evidence that I know of to support such a statement. Do you think the ones that are not guppies any longer will have a different chromosome count?
Well, according to Darwin, this where different species come from. You may or may not choose believe this explanation, but any book which explains the idea of Natural Selection can describe it for you in detail.
There are numerous examples of selective breeding being used to create new species, just as I described. As I understand it, modern corn is now so different from the original plant from which it was derived (maize) that they can no longer pollinate one another. Maize and modern corn are now different species of plants.
WRT the chromosome count, the short answer is that these two groups of fish really will be genetically different. They may or may not have the same number of chromosomes, but it is the composition of the chromosomes, not their number, that really matters. (I'm guessing, but I'm pretty sure that apes and humans have the same number of chromosomes, yet they are clearly a different species).
You wouldn't even have to do that. Just get rid of the artificial manipulations of a selective breeding environment and they would eventually revert to the original.
Okay, I'll bite -- where on earth do you fantasize that you see such a thing in this article?
Could you name a few of those species?
Not if B was proven wrong even earlier than theory A's downfall, *and* doesn't even rise to the level of a scientific theory in the first place.
You wouldn't even have to do that. Just get rid of the artificial manipulations of a selective breeding environment and they would eventually revert to the original.
Actually, no. The population would continue to slowly change as a result of random mutation, but unless their big tails or large size puts them at a disadvantage, there is no reason for them to revert to their earlier form.
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