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."
Try it and get back to me. (I raise fish).
Let's consult the rule book.
The unscientific prollem I see with that is a conscious being (meaning you) has had controlling input over the selection process to achieve a desired outcome. If not a Creator, then who makes that selection in nature?
Guppy out...
Well, if this were the case, than it should be possible to reverse the selective changes done to any population. I think we both agree that no amount of manipulation is going to get us from a population of sparrows to an archaeopteryx.
I do agree that we would probably see this population of fish revert if (1) they are allowed to interbreed with regular guppies, or (2) if they are put into an environment that favors normal guppies. However, if they are kept distinct and are not at a disadvantage, there is no mechanisim (that I am aware of) which would cause them to revert.
If you disagree, can you explain how this might occur? Do they carry with them all of their old genetic code?
Every organisim is in competition with others of its kind. Some are better at surviving than others. This competitive pressure is one form of selection.
Another is environmental change. My back yard, now a lawn, was once a forest; long before that, it was a sea. As the environment changes, animals must adapt to these changes, or perish.
Schwabe C.
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston 29425, USA. schwabec@musc.edu
The new hypothesis of evolution establishes a contiguity of life sciences with cosmology, physics, and chemistry, and provides a basis for the search for life on other planets. Chemistry is the sole driving force of the assembly of life, under the subtle guidance exerted by bonding orbital geometry. That phenomenon leads to multiple origins that function on the same principles but are different to the extent that their nucleic acid core varies. Thus, thoughts about the origins of life and the development of complexity have been transferred from the chance orientation of the past to the realm of atomic structures, which are subject to the laws of thermodynamics and kinetics. Evolution is a legitimate subject of basic science, and the complexity of life will submit to the laws of chemistry and physics as the problem is viewed from a new perspective. The paradigm connects life to the big events that formed every sphere of our living space and that keeps conditions fine-tuned for life to persist, perhaps a billion years or more. The "genomic potential" hypothesis leads to the prediction that life like ours is likely to exist in galaxies that are as distant from the origin of the universe as the Milky Way, and that the habitable zone of our galaxy harbors other living planets as well.
Copyright 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Sparrows and archaeopteryx are different species. One cannot become another. This is not what is being discussed.
You are dealing with specific traits that have been emphasized among select populations of the same species, and which will dissapear (return to the original) if not kept selectively enhanced. It's simple to prove this in a tank, try it. Some of each generation will exibit traits of the originating generation and continue interbreeding with the ones that have the emphasized traits till they are all back in the original state (outside influences removed).
This is the reason (specific traits being exhibited among some members of each generation that are not common to the entire generation) that allowed breeding the specific 'big tail' traits to begin with. It's the same with people, look at 'family' traits and how they are carried on or not carried on by subsequent generations according to the mates chosen by each generation. But the're all still human and each has various dominant and subordinate traits (height, color of eyes, skin, hair, etc. that could be selectively bred to make different 'racial' groups over time.
So long as we are talking about animals of the same species, unusual traits might well receed into dormancy. However, if we continue our experiment to the point where our two groups are no longer able to interbreed, then this is no longer the case.
Environmental pressures, potential mates.
You are saying that "Intelligent Design" has already been proven wrong and really isn't even a theory???????
Well, you're half right.
Actually, humans have a different number of chromosomes than apes do. But the nature of the difference actually provides unmistakable signs that humans evolved from the apes. See my post, How humans and chimps ended up having different number of chromosomes, and how this supports our common ancestry.
The site I linked an image from seems to be down right now, so here's an alternate view of the same info -- look at chromosome #2, which is the one I discuss in that post.
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