Re: [asa] The Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis

I'm not sure I see that, Dave. Woese seems to be complaining here about a
pressured, institutional commitment to a certain inflexible view of
evolution. Mike (and Woese) is pointing out some developments that did not
fit with this same view. The problem isn't that the people Woese are
complaining about turned out not to know everything, but that - or so I take
it - they acted as if they did, and discouraged questioning. And this
apparently had a detrimental effect on research.

I don't know enough about the field to know if that's true or not. But his
claim seems clear enough, at least.

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 11:48 PM, dfsiemensjr <dfsiemensjr@juno.com> wrote:

> The argument, as I see it, really doesn't fit. We did not, until very
> recently, have any genomes analyzed, but we are supposed to make predictions
> from the absence of information. We are beginning to get comparative genomic
> information and,with it, some expectations about what has happened in the
> past. I find Woese's complaint parallel to belittling Galileo because he did
> not discover Newton's laws and used geometry rather than the calculus. It
> seems to me that we must work with what we have.
> Dave (ASA)
>
> On Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:56:13 -0400 "Nucacids" <nucacids@wowway.com>
> writes:
>
> Hi Dave,
>
>
>
> “Still, the same gene provides the developmental pattern for the compound
> eye in Drosophila, the mammalian eye, and the different cephalopod eye.
> Seems to me this fits an evolutionary pattern.”
>
>
>
> Yes, that fits an evolutionary pattern. But Woese is talking about
> evolutionary processes. As he notes, “Instead, the focus was not the
> study of the evolutionary process so much as the care and tending of the
> modern synthesis.”
>
>
>
> Consider the fact that the modern synthesis completely failed to
> anticipate/predict the same gene would provide the developmental pattern for
> the compound eye in Drosophila, the mammalian eye, and the different
> cephalopod eye. If the modern synthesis does such a good job of
> explaining the evolutionary processes, how did it fail to anticipate such a
> hugely significant aspect of evolution? What’s more, not only did the
> modern synthesis fail to anticipate the same gene provides the developmental
> pattern for the compound eye in Drosophila, the mammalian eye, and the
> different cephalopod eye, it actually predicted we would NOT find that the
> same gene provides the developmental pattern for the compound eye in
> Drosophila, the mammalian eye, and the different cephalopod eye. If X is
> true, and a theory not only failed to predict X would be true, but predicted
> X would not be true, what does that say about the theory?
>
>
>
> Woese himself is more focused on lateral gene transfer, but there the same
> story applies. Not only did the modern synthesis fail to anticipate that
> LGT would play such a significant role in evolution, it actually resisted
> the idea that LGT would play such a significant role in evolution.
>
>
>
> Anyway, I encourage people to read the entire article. Woese has been a
> major player in biology for some time and has a track record of
> revolutionizing biology (the Three Domains and the proposal of a Darwinian
> threshold).
>
>
>
> Mike
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* dfsiemensjr <dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
> *To:* schwarzwald@gmail.com
> *Cc:* asa@calvin.edu
> *Sent:* Friday, September 25, 2009 11:54 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [asa] The Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis
>
> I don't get Woese's claim. The last biology class I took was over fifty
> years ago, but I have since gone through at least the abstracts of almost
> all of the articles in /Science/. I see a broad movement relative to
> evolution. The modern synthesis in its basic form combined natural selection
> with Mendelian genetics. But genetics is much more complicated than the
> simple pattern found in the nineteenth century. I learned that at least some
> of the 25,000 human genes, a smaller number that expected, produce more than
> one protein, and that control of the genes is not yet well understood.
> Still, the same gene provides the developmental pattern for the compound eye
> in Drosophila, the mammalian eye, and the different cephalopod eye. Seems to
> me this fits an evolutionary pattern. The latest issue of /Science/ that has
> come to hand has an article on rodent coloration, It involves three genes
> interacting complexly, along with a number of mutations, with a resulting
> differential survival in various milieus. Given the complexity of genomes,
> it looks to me as though we are doing fairly well in deciphering
> evolutionary patterns. Add in the discovery of a large number of fossils
> that show the developmental pattern, at least of the bones, and it seems to
> me that evolutionary studies are doing quite well. I'm sure that any
> practicing biologist can add many items to my short list.
> Dave (ASA)
>
> On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:40:51 -0400 Schwarzwald <schwarzwald@gmail.com>
> writes:
>
> 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
>>
>
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________
> Best Weight Loss Program - Click Here!<http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2142/fc/BLSrjpTFoYcldqZKWXqvqZtLPuWbnJvUJbO8sDWLygEYZusvwB81jmgWqKc/>
>
> ------------------------------
>
>
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 8.5.409 / Virus Database: 270.13.113/2395 - Release Date: 09/25/09
> 17:52:00
>
>
>
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sun Sep 27 01:08:33 2009