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."
Certainly, you believe that hybridization can create a new species?
Apparently, Satan had a backup. Crafty ol' devil.
No.
No.
Well, consider the domestic cow and the American Bison. These are certainly two seperate species, but, like many related species, they are able to interbreed. In this case, they can produce a new critter called a beefalo. This new animal, unlike a donkey, is fertile. It is genetically different from cows and bison.
I suppose you might argue that this is not a new species, but simply a new varient or strain. However, if we accept that bison and cows are different species, it becomes harder for me to accept that a beefalo is just a new strain of cow, while it is simultainiously a new strain of bison. Nonetheless, there is not a firm, well-agreed-upon point at which two different animals conclusively diverge into two seperate species, so we may have to agree to disagree about that.
The one gold-standard way of distinguishing one species from another is when they diverge so far as to be incapable of interbreeding. Unfortunatly, this usually takes a great deal of time, many thousands of years at a minimum, so it is going to be hard to find a concrete example.
If I can run down the details of an experiment involving fruit flies, that selected them for a long enough period that they were incapable of interbreeding with the original source population, would you accept that?
You are stating speculation as fact. There is no example that can be given of a 'new' species arising form an original parent population. Cows and Buffalo are adaptations of the same animal to two very different environments (all species have a fairly wide variety of traits that can become dominant to allow for surviving climatic and other environmental changes. That doesn't mean they become new species as they adapt since they, as in the guppies example, will revert to their original state if the environmental changes are reversed), both can interbreed, both would (probably) be able to interbreed with their parent population if that animal were known and around for breeding purposes. You might as well claim that African humans are a different species from European and Oriental humans if you are going to use the Buffalo/Cow example.
There is no actual example of one species arising from another, even with laboratory manipulation. Any claim that this can happen is speculation.
Many plants can crossbreed, even if they are of different genera. These are all the same species too?
Suppose I crossbreed plant A and plant B, yielding plant C. Suppose I further crossbreed plant C with other plants, yielding D, E, and F, until I finally get an example that will not crossbreed with either A or B. Is this a new species, or would we then be forced to conclude that not all members of a species can interbreed with one another?
Coffea Arabica is one such example - it cannot interbreed with either its closely related species, or with its ancestral species. Is this not a new species of plant?
Well, don't just speculate about it, Do it then present the results. That way we can deal with facts in the real world, not imaginary speculation.
Coffea Arabica is one such example - it cannot interbreed with either its closely related species, or with its ancestral species.
That is because they are different, and independent, species. What is the ancestral species, and how do you demonstrate that the 'ancestral' species produced it ( a new species)? Being in the same family does not prove that one species of that family gave rise to another of that family. Again, don't just make speculative statements, demonstrate it.
I can take the time to research just such an example, but I won't bother if you will simply dismiss it. Let's agree on the rules in advance:
If I find an example of a plant, repeatedly crossbred by humans, that can no longer crossbreed with one of its ancestral species, will you agree that this represents a new species of plant?
If it occurs in natural populations, breeds true from generation to generation, and doesn't (can't) interbreed with other subspecies of the same original population. That is basically what a specie is.
This gets kind of speculative here. It requires that every member of every subsequent generation of that subgroup cannot breed at different times than the general population (which would be a true loss of genetic information from that population). At least it seems speculative to me because I am unaware of this situation ocuring naturally. Is there one?
For Darwinism to be true, you must have new species arise through the injection of NEW information.
That's basically why (Darwinian) evolution never seems to pan out on close examination. This has never been demonstrated to happen, even under laboratory manipulation. And everything seems to go from higher organization to lower organization (Loss of information, as you mention in the frog example), not the reverse. It would seem to me that we are DEvolving, not Evolving, with fewer species and less genetic potentials.
That's quite different. If A is crossbred to produce B, and B is crossbred to produce C, even if A and C cannot interbreed you won't accept C as a new species, because A and C can both interbreed with B.
Obviously, if I point out any man-made line of crossbreeding steps, each plant at each step can interbreed with those near it, so no example would ever qualify. And any naturally occuring line is invalid because you will accept no proof that any plant, such as coffea arabica, was actually derived from the source that I claim.
You realise that by this definition, you would consider A and C to be the same species, even if they can't interbreed! I suppose that makes as much sence as saying bison and cows are the same species...
We'll have to just let it go at this point. I have no idea what I could possibly offer you.
There are any number of folk about who have already done the calculations (in their heads!) and they "know" that there is life out there on many, many planets. Why life didn't arise a billion times on earth already, they are not able to say.
Oh, yeah. You can see this principle at work all the time in paleontology.
lol.
But you are just narrowing and pinching off the gene pool for your sample. This is not developing a "new species" but only developing a retrograde, inbred group that has lost what functions it previously had. Losing function does not equate to new design (sic). for that, you need millions of simultaneously occuring similar mutations.
There is "evolution" and there is "devolution." They are not interchangeable concepts. How about selecting your guppies for breasts and hair?
Breaking news! Darwin is a progressive creationist.
I stand corrected.
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