Re: [asa] The Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis

Heya Mike,

What I find interesting here is that, in essence, Carl Woese is claiming
that one of the major impediments to science has been - believe it or not -
evolutionary biologists themselves. "Instead, the focus was not the study of
the evolutionary process so much as the care and tending of the modern
synthesis. Safeguarding an old concept, protecting “truths too fragile to
bear translation” is scientific anathema."? If Woese is right, than this is
one more example of science being impeded not by creationists or otherwise,
but the scientific establishment itself.

Of course, nothing Woese is saying here is challenging evolution in the
broad sense. Then again, I think an interesting question to ask would be "If
a certain view of evolution was being safeguarded and treated as beyond
questioning, why was this the case?"

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Nucacids <nucacids@wowway.com> wrote:

> Carl Woese has co-authored another thought-provoking article entitled,
> How the Microbial World Saved Evolution from the Scylla of Molecular Biology
> and the Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis. He makes many startling
> claims, including:
>
>
> http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/~nigel/REPRINTS/2009/WG%20How%20the%20microbial%20world%20saved%20evolution%20MMBR%202009.pdf<http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/%7Enigel/REPRINTS/2009/WG%20How%20the%20microbial%20world%20saved%20evolution%20MMBR%202009.pdf>
>
> "As for evolution, it had been developed from a phenomenological
> description centering around what was generally termed natural selection
> into the modern evolutionary synthesis through its union with Mendelian
> genetics. The modern evolutionary synthesis should have been the 20th
> century’s evolutionary bastion, the forefront of research into the
> evolutionary process. No such luck!
>
> The basic understanding of evolution, considered as a process, did not
> advance at all under its tutelage. The presumed fundamental explanation of
> the evolutionary process, “natural selection,” went unchanged and
> unchallenged from one end of the 20th century to the other. Was this because
> there was nothing more to understand about the nature of the evolutionary
> process? Hardly! Instead, the focus was not the study of the evolutionary
> process so much as the care and tending of the modern synthesis.
> Safeguarding an old concept, protecting “truths too fragile to bear
> translation” is scientific anathema. (The quote here is Alfred North
> Whitehead’s, and it continues thus: “A science which hesitates to forget its
> founders is lost” [32].) What makes the treatment of evolution by biologists
> of the last century insufferable scientifically is not the modern synthesis
> per se. Rather, it is the fact that molecular biology accepted the synthesis
> as a complete theory unquestioningly—thereby giving the impression that
> evolution was essentially a solved scientific problem with its roots lying
> only within the molecular paradigm.
>
> There you have it. An entire century spent studying biology without
> seriously addressing evolution, without assigning importance to the study of
> the evolutionary process. Our understanding of biology, of biological
> organization, far from being near complete (as molecularists would have us
> believe), seems still in its infancy."
>
> Woese is not making any anti-evolutionary claim here. He is simply
> pointing out something I have long been saying – that the Modern Synthesis
> has not delivered a full understanding of evolutionary processes and that
> our understanding of evolution is still rather primitive (
> http://designmatrix.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/the-logic-of-evolution/ ). What’s
> more, those who have embraced the Modern Synthesis as delivering a nearly
> complete understanding of evolutionary processes have a history is getting
> it wrong: they resisted symbiogenesis, neutral theory, lateral gene
> transfer, and deep homology. And in one sense, this is understandable, as
> symbiogenesis, neutral theory, lateral gene transfer, and deep homology all
> open the door, even if slightly, to a teleological interpretation of
> evolution.
>
>
>
> Mike
>

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Received on Fri Sep 25 22:41:48 2009