[forsnax5]

Another viewpoint on the forces of change...

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[forsnax5]

Ping!

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[PatrickHenry]

Ping!

[This ping list for the evolution -- not creationism -- side of evolution threads, and sometimes for other science topics. To be added (or dropped), let me know via freepmail.]

[Dan Day]

That enduring metaphor for the randomness of evolution, a blind watchmaker that works to no pattern or design, is being challenged by two European chemists. They say that the watchmaker may have been blind, but was guided and constrained by the changing chemistry of the environment, with many inevitable results.

Leave it to chemists to think they're adding something new to biology...

Before the usual band of creationists show up and yell, "see, evolutionists are so dumb every keeps correcting them", I should point out that evolution has *long* realized that the environment, which includes chemical constraints, constraints due to physics, etc., limits and channels, to some extent, which evolutionary innovations are a) possible, b) practical, and c) advantageous.

If I recall correctly, Darwin even said something to that effect in the Origin of Species back in the 1859, so this is hardly a novel realization.

Even Dawkins acknowledges that his "blind watchmaker" analogy results in a watch that works within the laws of physics, it can't just make *anything* work.

If the chemists have discovered some *specific* chemical constraints that shed light on certain evolutionary steps of life on Earth, cool, but the general concept alone is nothing new.

[js1138]

The breakfast garbage that you throw in to the Bay,
They drink at lunch in San Jose.

evopolution placeholder

[jonno]

I wish I could have explained to me in a non-condescending manner, how or what random process developed vision - the eyeball.

Regards,

[CalConservative]

That cytoplasm was partly dominated by the reducing chemistry of the primitive oceans and atmosphere from which it formed, and has changed little since, says Williams.

If I could just point out one tiny, itsy bitsy problem here: the geologic evidence does not document a reducing atmosphere in the primitive earth - there is plenty of oxygen as evidenced by the presence of ferric iron in the rocks from these time periods.

These guys are apparently making the same erroneous assumptions Stanley Miller did in 1953. The presence of oxygen in any significant quantities is anathema to these reactions.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Is this really news? This is what they were teaching when I was in school in the 70's.

[dirtboy]

"It's part of a quiet paradigm revolution going on in biology, in which the radical randomness of Darwinism is being replaced by a much more scientific law-regulated emergence of life."

I'd take it one step further - I think organisms can react to environmental changes within their own lifetimes, imprint those changes on their own DNA, and THEN pass the changes to their offspring. Takes even more of the randomness out of Darwinian evolution, and accounts for instincts being imprintible in genes.