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."
Could you name a few of those species?
For starters, there's Canis familiaris, which is no longer the same species as Canis lupus.
Zea mays is no longer the same species as Zea mexicana, from which it arose.
The species Triticum turgidum gave rise to Triticum aestivum.
How many more would you like?
You are saying that "Intelligent Design" has already been proven wrong and really isn't even a theory???????
"Intelligent Design" wasn't the issue in the post to which I was responding. The suggested alternative to evolution in that post was "the world and everything in it" being created in the span of "seven days". That notion is neither a theory, in the scientific sense, nor supported by the evidence -- in fact the evidence falsifies it, whether evolution is true or not.
But since you ask, no, "ID" is indeed not a theory (in the scientific sense) -- or at least none of its proponents have constructed a theory of it -- and as such it's vague enough and epistemologically empty enough that it can neither be disproven nor proven in its current form.
From the article:
Yet when it comes to his most provocative idea, Dr. Schwabe is practically an invisible man.
Dogs and wolves can often interbreed; modern corn and wheat are hybrids that were combined (naturally) with other plants, and are not the result of selection alone.
The best example I can find is a reference to selection experiments with fruit flies, which can create a population that can breed only among themselves. I'm guessing that most animals and plants evolve too slowly by selection alone for us to find many good examples.
And from the link you provided: "Schwabe claims that life arose directly from pools of chemicals in a natural way. He points out that the Miller-Urey experiment produced amino acids in exactly the same proportions as found in the Murchison meteorite. This means that truly universal laws of chemistry are at work. Those laws are favourable for the origin of life."
The Miller-Urey experiment. (From What biology textbooks never told you about evolution by Royal Truman)
"With the most astute intelligent guidance, such an experimental set-up, which generates a multitude of interfering organic acids and bases (plus racemic and biologically useless amino acids) cannot produce a single biologically relevant protein strand.
"Oxygen, deliberately removed from Miller’s apparatus, destroys amino acids. But geological evidence indicates oxygen was always present on earth. It is produced by photolysis of water vapour in the atmosphere, where hydrogen escapes gravitation and oxygen thereby increases in concentration.
"Currently, the most probable early atmosphere is deemed by evolutionists to have consisted of water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and hydrogen, a very different composition than used by Miller. Hydrogen would have been present in small concentrations at most, because it could escape Earth’s gravity; ammonia and methane would have been destroyed by ultraviolet light. In 1983, Miller reported that if carbon monoxide is added to the more realistic mixture, plus a large proportion of free hydrogen, then only glycine, the simplest amino acid, could be produced, and in trace amounts only."
Favourable? Whereas Darwin relies only upon a single "little" abiogensis miracle, Schwab relies upon many "whoppers".
As much as thats been tried it's never happened. No one has ever shown that once species can change into another.
So, you are saying that Canis Familiaris (the Dog) and Canis Lupus (the Wolf are different species since they can no longer interbreed? Well, I guess that puts the wolf hybrid people out of business, they cannot breed wolf/dog hybrids.
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). You're going to show that one gave rise to the other. Same with the two varieties of Triticum (wheat).
How many more would you like?
Just one would suffice. You might want to review what constitutes a Species first, and quit giving examples of subspiecies within the same Species. You may then want to demonstrate that this was done by selective breeding.
Welcome to the "Festival of Worn-out Trolls"
Interesting how a single letter polymorphism (or "SLP") has completely changed the nature of this thread, imitating evolution.
Darwin said nothing about abiogenesis. His theory explained how numerous species arose from a first life form, but said nothing about where that first living thing came from; in fact, he assumed (on the last page of The Origin of Species) that the first life form was created.
Tis is silly at face value. There are lots of perfectly natural phenomena that are irreversable in practice. The breaking of glass, for example.
This is what is called the fallacy of begging the question.
Perfect summary of the article.
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